Exegy’s Vision for the Next 20 Years
By David Taylor
Chief Executive Officer, Exegy
March 2023 marked Exegy’s 20th anniversary, celebrating our transformation from a university research project on high-performance computing into a global financial technology company.
The pace of that transformation accelerated dramatically in the past two years with the integration of the people, partners, and products of Vela and Enyx, each with their own rich stories of innovation and success.
In its 20th year, Exegy completed a succession plan that passed the leadership baton to an executive team composed of both long-tenured insiders and newly recruited industry veterans.
True to form, we have not spent much time looking back, but rather are surging forward. Importantly, our cardinal direction of travel has not wavered. We believe that capital markets maximize their value to the global community when they are trustworthy, accessible, efficient, resilient, transparent, and competitive. This belief is codified in our corporate mission and vision statements, which reflect our shared commitment and inspiration.
In the same way, our role in advancing Exegy’s vision remains unchanged. We partner with market participants to help them determine prices, access liquidity, and manage risk with products and services that are fast, dependable, easy-to-use, affordable, and scalable.
Specifically, we focus on addressing the connectivity, real-time data, and automation challenges of professional traders in the financial front office.
Sustained volatility, ballooning market data volumes, relentless increases in speed, and the rapid evolution of AI-driven signals are some of the formidable challenges now and for the foreseeable future.
Why Exegy?
Recently, I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing senior executives at our global bank and principal trading partners as part of our “Voice of the Customer” sessions. While each conversation is wide-ranging and unique, I always include the key question of “why Exegy?” Why do they choose Exegy, stay with us, grow with us? Across these varied firms, I was struck by the fact that many cited the same reason: Expertise.
One senior executive told me that across all our partnership touchpoints – operations and monitoring, managed services, solutions consulting, product strategy, executive leadership – Exegy consistently delivers valuable expertise on the markets, technology, and their implications for our customers’ business. The executive in question had a well-earned reputation among our team members for being direct and exacting both in praise and critique, so that feedback was encouraging to them and enormously gratifying to me.
I am fiercely proud of the Exegy team, and I couldn’t be more pleased that their merit is recognized by our customers. Maintaining and enhancing the value of our expertise in our customers’ eyes requires continuous care, especially as we carry out ambitious corporate growth strategies of our own. One of my primary leadership goals is to nurture the competence, curiosity, and customer-centricity that together produce expertise.
Experts innovate
In addition to scaling our expert culture, another invariant as Exegy grows is our sustained commitment to innovation. Our notable recent achievements include expanding coverage of global markets across our market data and execution solutions, especially in emerging markets, fixed income, and crypto derivatives. The integration of FPGA-based, tick-to-cancel functionality from our nxAccess platform with our options trading platform, Metro, was honored as the Best New Product at the 11th Annual Markets Choice Awards. We also won ten new patents in the past 18 months, adding to an intellectual property portfolio that is one of our industry’s largest.
One of my primary leadership goals is to nurture the competence, curiosity, and customer-centricity that together produce expertise.”
As we look for avenues to continue innovation, we see three major opportunities to apply our expertise to the evolving needs of traders:
Intelligent market data
In the present era of data-driven trading, market data must not only be timely, correct, and easy to consume, but also contain appropriate context to maximize its utility, including predictions of its future state. This view has been confirmed by our customer community, especially the strategic partners and early adopters of our Signum suite of predictive signals.
We believe we have only begun to advance Exegy’s vision for intelligent market data. We will unlock considerably more value for our customers as we continue combining our expertise in purpose-built hardware (FPGAs), market microstructure, and machine learning, while applying the unique operational data and insights gleaned from our global managed services network.
Future-proof technology
We are expanding our role in insulating traders from the relentless rise in technology table stakes by helping them build future-proof technology stacks. While sustained volatility represents commercial opportunity for traders, it makes building and maintaining world-class trading systems that are reliable, fast, and scalable increasingly difficult, time-consuming, and expensive.
We see opportunities to make this even easier, faster, and more affordable as we broaden the application of our expertise in building and remotely managing FPGA-based market data systems and delivering historical and real-time market data to applications in public clouds. Our goal is to provide a consistent, simple user experience for the full front-office trading cycle while abstracting the complexity of the diverse underlying infrastructure. In doing so, we will help match the resource – on premise, hosted and cloud – to the trading task at hand.
Flexible engagement
The dynamism of modern capital markets changes the traditional calculus that once went into deciding which parts of a trading system to buy from a trusted partner and which parts to build and maintain internally. Further complicating this decision, most traders want to minimize the number of third-party partners that they use, especially in mission-critical front office roles. In response, we have developed a broad product portfolio that ranges from a fully managed direct market access (DMA) platform to a development framework and intellectual property blocks for building hardware trading systems in FPGAs.
We see this as a durable trend in the markets. Accordingly, we have made it a strategic imperative to align the granularity of our product offerings and the scope of our development and management services to serve as a true partner with our customers as they evolve their “buy and build” strategies.
Exegy is powering the future of capital markets, reimagining our role as a vital partner of the most elite trading firms in the world. Our next 20 years are poised to be an even more exciting journey for our distinguished global team.
To join us on this journey, get in touch with an Exegy expert today.
