BST Awards 2020: Best cloud provider to the buy side—BT Radianz Cloud

For the second year running, BT Radianz Cloud claims the title of best cloud provider to the buy side.

BT Radianz is a private cloud with access to over 160 trading venues in 64 countries. Members can select from over 3,300 providers of applications, market data, and services available through the ecosystem. Since June 2019, the cloud provider added 163 new global customers and 539 new sites.

Yousaf Hafeez, head of business development for financial solutions at BT Radianz, says the firm’s deep relationship with the buy side helps develop useful solutions for customers. The best way to create a product roadmap, Hafeez says, is to ask customers what they will need next year, rather than trying to anticipate it. 

“A lot of products, services, and features that we have made available in the last few months really started development in 2018,” he says. “I can recall sitting down with a large number of buy-side firms in 2018 and saying, ‘What are the challenges you’re going to be facing in 12 to 15 months?’”

Hafeez says BT Radianz has noticed a growing trend among buy-side clients looking for simpler access to public cloud, and the firm has instituted a strategy that will, hopefully, ease that pain point. Over the last 12 months, the provider has increased the capacity it has to public clouds and can now offer up to 10 gigabytes of access to them. 

In addition to possible cost savings, a draw for customers to utilize public clouds is the opportunity for more functionality, specifically in terms of analytics tools, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine-learning applications. 

Hafeez says the company is seeing a lot of interest around fixed income. As a result, BT Radianz is looking to increase its coverage of fixed-income data, fixed-income trading sources, and venues. 

“Fixed income is of tremendous interest to our customers, and it’s an area where they are allocating more resources,” Hafeez says.