Crisil Coalition Greenwich cited “insatiable” demand for market data as a top market structure trend to watch in 2025. “Market participants once again expect to spend more on market data in the year ahead,” the consultancy said in a report. “Whether moving into a new country, a new asset class or a new investment strategy, the first step is always gaining access to new data.”
“The data itself is only the first step in that journey,” the report stated. “New delivery mechanisms (e.g., cloud for real-time market data), better analytics (AI anyone?) and tools to make that data actionable on the trading desk are all areas of critical investment that support the demand for more market data.”
Trading Technologies, a SaaS provider to the global capital markets industry, is emphasizing buy-side product offerings of data, analytics, and transaction cost analysis as a key business line for this year.
Traders Magazine spoke with Peter Weiler, Executive Vice President and Head of Data & Analytics at Trading Technologies, to learn more.
What is your professional background?
I came to TT via the 2023 acquisition of Abel Noser Solutions. I was the CEO there after we did a management buyout with a private equity firm, and then we managed to find TT – (CEO) Keith Todd and the rest of the team.
Our TCA practice at Abel Noser was US-centric, but now we are expanding, particularly into EMEA. That was an important reason why the acquisition was made, and more importantly, we really felt that data and analytics and trading all coming together is the future. So having an ecosystem that includes data and analytics along with trade execution is going to be critical.
What distinguishes the Trading Technologies TCA product?
We have all the asset classes you can think about in terms of measurement, and we’re now streaming a lot of our practices, particularly on the futures side. When you have a platform like TT’s that handles as much as 15% to 25% of a contract’s volume, it gives us a lot of ability to observe trades and benchmark trades. That’s a big part of what we do on the analytics side – we want to be able to provide absolute costs versus different benchmarks, and then create a relative benchmark that’s apples to apples.
We’re really thrilled about the data side of our business. We have a lot of proprietary data – it’s not data we own, but it’s data we control. Our thought process here is to bring unique products derived from this data to the marketplace to help our clients.
What are your primary data & analytics initiatives currently?
The next step is expanding our derivatives practice. We have options on cash equities, but in the next phase, we’re talking about options on futures, options on fixed income, and options on other asset classes down the road.
We’re incorporating technology, whether it’s large language models or machine learning, into our analytics and into our data. Whether that’s a chat box-type technology or querying systems, we are training models to answer simple questions that come up that are derived from user manuals, for example.
We’re also taking it to the next level with some clients, where we’re looking at their trading and their historical trading results versus what our model was telling them to do. These clients want automation, but rather than just automating their trading they really need the serious gray matter of being part of a machine learning process that is continually improving.
How is data & analytics evolving more broadly?
TCA is emerging as a must-have, and the use cases are changing as we go along. What used to be mostly just tick-the-box is now something that people use for alpha creation. They still are ticking the box with TCA, i.e., using it for regulatory purposes, but they also want to leverage that data to improve their trading. The end goal is for the data and analytics to come together in an intuitive way to produce actionable recommendations.
One trend we’re starting to see is cross-asset measurement analysis. As we know, many trading desks are becoming more centralized, and you need to be somebody who knows a lot of the asset classes. There are many paired transactions done for which people want to see total transaction costs, and you need large data universes to know those costs.
Another advance is what I would call a state-of-the-art graphic user interface. The GUI we have is one we’re always refreshing and is being modernized. Delivery is via APIs and/or our GUI, including dashboards, and we’ll have chat boxes to answer complex data queries.
I think all of that will come together this year, and this evolution is top-of-mind for everybody at TT.
