Keith Todd is CEO, Trading Technologies.
What were the key themes for your business in 2024?
Multi-asset expansion, traction in new services and continued momentum. In 2024, we made significant progress in our continued transformation into a true multi-asset platform with services across the trade lifecycle. Trading Technologies has long been known as the go-to platform for exchange-traded derivatives. Our establishment of six business lines in 2024 enabled us to truly diversify our business, with the ability to meet client needs across asset classes as well provide the X factor to improve trading and compliance through analytics, algos and surveillance. These six areas of focus include product areas, such as futures and options, fixed income and foreign exchange (FX), along with trade lifecycle offerings in data and analytics, compliance and quantitative trading solutions.
Our acquisition of ATEO SAS in February was significant, giving us an entry into the post-trade world with a powerful middle-office solution for exchange-traded derivatives. TT Clearing – formerly ATEO’s LISA Clearing Engine – now has 40 clients ranging from Tier-1 banks to futures commission merchants (FCMs), agency brokers and buy-side participants. They’re using TT Clearing for trade matching, allocation and clearing for their operations throughout North America, Europe and Asia, and it’s now available to clients as a global managed service.
Our expansion into new asset classes in 2024 also included the world’s two largest physical energy markets in Europe – the European Power Exchange (EPEX Spot) and Nord Pool – that our clients can now trade side by side with energy financial markets.
In mid-2024, following our acquisition of Abel Noser Solutions in 2023, we introduced TT Futures TCA – a comprehensive transaction cost analysis tool for futures trading that leverages the largest collection available of anonymized, microsecond-level futures market and trade data. Only TT could provide this sort of underlying real-world data because our platform has handled more than 2.5 billion transactions in 2024 alone.
We also expanded our compliance offering with the launch in 2024 of TT Trade Surveillance as a solution combining new multi-asset coverage and dozens of new configurable models to supplement the machine learning-driven models from TT Score, our first-generation trade surveillance platform.
The year was momentous on many fronts, including 14 global and regional honors and awards for the TT platform, trade surveillance capabilities, algorithmic trading solution, TCA tool, execution management system (EMS), order management system (OMS) and market data services.
What are your expectations for 2025?
Our revenue is now double what it was just three years ago when we embarked on this expansion. We have only just begun building our new lines of business and helping our clients understand what’s coming so we have substantial opportunity for growth in 2025 and beyond. We anticipate growth across all six lines of business in the coming year.
We’ve also previewed plans to make inroads into the rapidly growing equity options trading space with the early 2025 introduction of access to Cboe equity index options. This will provide our institutional and professional trading clients with the ability to use the TT platform and breadth of tools to trade these immensely popular index options, including the SPX and VIX.
As you will hear a lot around TT, business is a team game, and I believe we have the best team in the business, with a culture that fosters empowerment throughout the organization. I believe we’ll see record organic growth in 2025 because we are firing on all cylinders.
What trends are getting underway that people may not know about but will be important?
The capital markets trading industry is in for an interesting year in 2025. With the change in the U.S. political environment, the big question is: will regulation be rolled back? The early signs are that the digital assets stakeholders are expecting light oversight at the most. Will this lead to more professional asset managers and traders joining the market, or will they join in markets that have tighter regulations? There is no doubt that the continued growth in trading volumes will occur, driven by uncertainty as well as the ever-increasing retail participation globally. The sophistication of trading will continue with data and AI improving traders’ effectiveness, particularly as multi-asset trading accelerates.
