Trading Technologies, a SaaS provider to the global capital markets industry, has had a busy past few years, with multiple acquisitions, expansion into new markets, and strong organic growth.
Traders Magazine caught up with Trading Technologies CEO Keith Todd to learn more about where the firm stands heading into 2025.
How would you describe Trading Technologies as the firm stands today?
We’ve described ourselves as a technology platform services provider that aims to become the operating system of the capital markets. But it’s important to look at this question through the eyes of our customers. We’re in the business of facilitating successful and compliant trading. That spans EMS, OMS, algos, surveillance, data, and analytics, all to improve the profitability of trading. So customers engage with us because we help them with successful and compliant trading.
What would you cite as primary recent accomplishments of the firm?
Over the past three years we’ve established a company with a vibrant, dynamic and an empowered culture. This has allowed us to drive significant growth, and through organic growth and acquisitions, the company has doubled revenue from three years ago.
If we focus strictly on 2024 accomplishments, it’s easy to alight upon our acquisition of ATEO SAS, which is an important step in the completion of our exchange-traded derivatives offering. But I think the key has been the establishment of the six businesses, six engines on the TT plane, and significantly broadening our offerings to our customers across FX, fixed income, data and analytics, compliance, algos, and obviously futures and options.
How much have acquisitions driven Trading Technologies’ growth, and what is the M&A plan going forward?
In my opinion, the primary responsibility of an executive team in any business is to create an organic growth engine, and Trading Technologies has generated compound organic growth of 17% annually. That’s our primary responsibility. But acquisitions play a material role two ways: filling functional gaps, and accelerating our growth. We’ve certainly seen the benefit of acquisitions as a complement to the other activities that we’ve been driving.
What are the challenges associated with Trading Technologies being a much larger firm?
It’s a legitimate question, but we first need to cite the law of relativity here, as we’re still a minnow compared to Broadridge, FIS, and some others.
When one brings new companies into an organization, and when one brings an organization that really only worked in one field – futures and options – into a wider base of capital markets, culture is critically important.
One mantra we operate by is, “business is a team game.” We are not in silos. We’re all playing the game together. For example, in our fixed income offering, it’s not just about the RFQ engine or the connectivity to the market – it’s also about the hedging of interest rates, the FX, the data analytics, and the surveillance. So it’s really important that one has a clear vision of the company, but it’s also important for the team to be aligned in the way they think and operate. That’s when success comes.
Personally, I believe that the success we’ve had over the last three years is based on the reinvention of the culture, which was about building on the old TT family culture, and injecting a degree of pace, energy, focus, and ambition. We have a powerful group of 450 empowered, energetic, and knowledgeable employees, and we have delivered great results.
What is Trading Technologies’ 2025 focus?
The headline answer is growth across all our businesses.
We laid the foundation for our new businesses in 2024. We had to simplify organizational complexity and also help customers understand these new offerings. And now we have one line of business with very significant market share and the other five at the foothills of their opportunity. We are expecting double-digit growth in these businesses, which some are already seeing.
When I look at 2025, I say with good confidence that we’re going to see record organic growth, because all engines will be firing and operating effectively.
How would you describe your own role at Trading Technologies?
I’m well-informed because I’m very connected to what’s going on. I motivate and empower, but I also have very clear guardrails that are about protecting from the downside.
And personally, I can’t remember a time when I’ve had so much fun in the business.
