Looking Ahead to ETAS

For those of you who read this column and are based in London, Thursday should give an interesting and valuable series of discussions on the nuts and bolts of the trading world. The European Trading Architecture Summit (ETAS) returns to the Hilton at Canary Wharf once again, following its successful first years, covering a wide range of hot-button topics.

After the welcome address from Waters' editor-in-chief, Victor Anderson, we'll be treated to ex-Bank of America vet and current UBS Group Data CTO Tom Dalglish for the keynote. Tom's long been a valued supporter of our events and webcasts, so it should promise to be an excellent half-hour. After that, we'll be splitting into two streams. I'll be chairing the first, which covers Big Data and cloud, and Victor will be bossing the second, which will cover field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), hosted trading platforms, latency and more.

After the lunch break, we'll be back in one stream, chaired by Bob Giffords. We'll be covering the automation of OTC trading, a presentation on out-of-industry uses for data analytics from the University of Dundee, and drilling down into the forensics of outsourcing for our final panel of the day. Drinks, of course, follow.

The front office, naturally, gains a lot of attention in all areas of the financial press, whether that's a mainstream paper or a niche, dedicated trade magazine such as ourselves. But you can't have a front office without the underlying architecture, and events like these really do provide value for those working in these areas.

Hopefully, I'll see you in Canary Wharf come Thursday. Do say hello.

For information on the event, including the venue, agenda, speakers and more, see the website here.