Automation of existing software platforms – part 2

Evolving the capability of existing trading platforms is a vital process within any banking platform, to allow the continued optimization of workflows and improve the utilization of the available workforce. However, continued configuration changes can make systems more fragile, and upgrades harder.

The storage of additional data within the platform also causes problems, as most trading platforms do not allow clients the ability to add their own instrument or client static data. This can greatly limit the possible customizations/automations.

So how do you add data to a hosted trading platform today? Much of the static and reference data used by modern trading platforms comes directly from a ticker plant, or external market data providers, and will be consumed in real-time by the trading platform. If new instruments are added by the exchange for trading today, the trading platform will have picked up the fact by the daily upload of data in the morning. Other client static data is often added by APIs or upload spreadsheets. This works well for data that the platform is pre-configured to handle.

But how do you add data into a real-time data table for which you don’t know the data types? The answer is that Fidessa’s real-time database technology now supports blob fields, which means they can store any data type and any length of field. Add to that an API that allows you to write this data, and you can update static data in real-time. This information will then be available for automations in the future, without the need to configure databases or rebuild database structures.

In my next blog, I will look at the even trickier problem of removing configuration, even on a running system.