BST Awards 2025: Best low-latency trading network—Reactive Markets

Overview

Reactive Markets provides purpose-built, ultra-low latency trading technology that connects its clients to all their bilateral liquidity relationships across all asset classes. Available via user interface, API or any execution management system, order management system or pricing engine, Reactive Markets’ clients benefit from flexibility, ultra-low latency connectivity and exceptional liquidity access. The Harpenden, UK-based firm’s high-performance network provides its clients with access to over 35 of the industry’s leading liquidity providers.

The solution  

Reactive Markets’ technology is purpose-built to cater to the demands of today’s bilateral trading environment, offering clients access to a highly scalable technology stack. The firm provides a completely open, multi-asset trading network specializing in high-performance API and GUI bilateral trading connectivity.

Secret sauce  

Reactive Markets sees its ability to provide what it describes as “transparently the fastest, most efficient and most cost-effective trading technology service available on the market” as its competitive differentiator.

Recent milestones

• Reactive Markets has established its service as one of the largest FX technology providers in the capital markets. It has a steady flow of FX clients across the hedge fund, bank and broker sectors.
• This year, Reactive Markets adapted its tech stack to support bilateral cash equities across over 10,000 symbols in UK/EU and US markets. This bilateral cash equities offering enables clients to optimize execution strategies through greater access to bilateral liquidity.
• The firm also launched new dealer-to-dealer trading technology currently used by many of the industry’s largest banks.

Future objectives

• Reactive Markets plans to “lead the debate” on transparency and performance standards across the market through its chief revenue officer, Henry Durrant, where he will discuss the firm’s end-to-end latency and how it measures performance across its purpose-built trading technology.
• Reactive Markets will utilize its new performance environment to enable it to deterministically measure its end-to-end performance. It will also share its findings transparently with its clients.
• Reactive Markets will continue to enhance its client analytics, providing clients with insight into performance and benchmarking

Why they won

Ask any buy-side trader what their biggest pain point is and you’re likely to hear something along the lines of identifying high-quality liquidity and then executing orders fast, accurately and efficiently based on that liquidity. That is Reactive Markets’ bread and butter and the principal reason why the UK-based trading technology specialist finds itself in the winners’ circle of the BST Awards for its inaugural win.

Reactive Markets, founded in January 2019, secured its win thanks largely to the speed, transparency and efficiency of its bilateral trading connectivity, a model that typically entails direct, point-to-point relationships between buy-side firms and liquidity providers, bypassing centralized exchanges and enabling customized pricing, tighter spreads and better control of trade executions. The firm’s ultra-low latency technology supports seamless access to liquidity across all asset classes, connecting clients to more than 35 liquidity providers through API, GUI or integration into existing execution and order management systems. Its multi-asset network is engineered for scalability and high performance, allowing its buy-side clients to execute trades swiftly and transparently with the minimum of fuss.

In the past year, Reactive Markets has achieved a number of industry firsts, including the launch of a bilateral cash equities service covering over 10,000 UK, EU and US symbols, and a dealer-to-dealer trading platform already in use by a number of tier-one banks. Its commitment to transparent performance metrics, client analytics and measurable latency benchmarks distinguishes it as of the industry’s go-to providers of reliable, transparent and efficient trading technology.