Feroz Cader and Rob Brouwer, Co-Heads of LSEG Technology Sri Lanka, discuss how the Malabe-based tech unit of LSEG is shaping the future of financial market infrastructure (FMI).

LSEG Technology has something for everyone from sophisticated top-tier global exchanges to new-fangled crypto exchanges, and trading houses in emerging markets for plain-vanilla assets such as equities and bonds.

The Malabe campus operates platforms that run the London Stock Exchange, Borsa Italiana, Turquoise, a multi-asset European trading platform, and its clients include the London Clearing House and stock exchanges of Singapore, Hong Kong, Johannesburg, Peru, Argentina, Casablanca and many more.

What can you tell us about LSEG Technology and the markets it serves?

Brouwer: LSEG Technology is a financial markets infrastructure service provider for exchanges, clearinghouses, regulators, and depositories.

The financial market infrastructure (FMI) solutions we provide fall under various global, regional, and country-specific regulatory bodies that are focused on creating fair marketplaces that are resilient to shocks so that they do not cause systemic risks.

We have been doing this for over two decades, perfecting a suite of tech solutions for top-tier and emerging markets.

We have a product range that covers the needs of all these institutions. We do not deliver software, separate components or layers of an operating system.

Instead, we see ourselves as a service provider with the entire suite of products optimized for specific customer needs. Cloud technology has been an enormous enabler in that transformation.

LSEG Technology has a large internal customer base (London Stock Exchange Group) which is very progressive moving into the cloud and moving away from expensive third-party vendors.We developed and now host Atom, a crypto exchange that trades 24×7.

While Atom operates on the same software and trading platforms LSEG Technology has developed for top-tier exchanges such as the London Stock Exchange, Borsa Italiana or Turquoise, the fact that its cloud-enabled makes it very cost-effective.

What this means is that we can now operate high-end and emerging market trading platforms, all out of LSEG Technology’s campus at Malabe.The cloud-enabled route is where we are heading. We want to be the enablers of change in financial markets.

Our entire portfolio of solutions is cloud-ready which means cost-effective and faster deployment.

What are some of technologies pioneered or influenced by LSEG Technology?

Cader: Technology keeps evolving. We were the first to introduce a solution based on FPGAs (Hardware Acceleration) to disseminate market data from an exchange, we were the first to use GPUs to compute risk for a CCP.

We now see a convergence of technologies with CPU, GPU and interconnects of those all on a single chip with built in ML/AI capabilities. It doesn’t stop there.All these new technologies are cloud ready to take advantage of reduced cost.

All our products are securely deployable on cloud and our new product design takes advantage of cloud specific features such as dynamic scalability, further optimising operational costs.

Further, we are the only vendor globally to develop a product suite on a common technology platform making it far less expensive to operate the entire order-to-trade FMI stack – That is from order entry, order execution, market data publication, trade reporting, clearing and settlement functions and the only provider to develop all of that out of a single location here in Sri Lanka at our state of the art campus facility.

This provides us an advantage no one other vendor in the market can provide and this is a fiercely competitive niche market.

Irrespective of FinTech, the next revolution in the software industry would be the automation of software development.

We have worked on domain descriptive language that is able to describe the FMI space where business and regulatory requirements can be modelled using a domain specific language that will produce the software automatically. We are talking about an automated production line for software.