Developed full technology stack for an options-centric introducing broker.
Summary
The legacy infrastructure consisted of a vended order management system with a single user execution platform. As the firm’s trading volumes grew, their vended infrastructure began to experience outages under the increased load. Symphono was hired to build a scalable infrastructure that would give them more control of their order flow.
Symphono designed and developed a suite of technology solutions which addressed their performance issues while providing them with lower total cost of ownership and an enhanced competitive advantage in securing and retaining trading customers.
What We Did
- Built a Java-based custom order management system, leveraging FIX for third party integration
- Developed a modular C#/WPF user execution system allowing the customer to offer a lower cost trading platform to their prospective clients, which reduced start up costs for their trading clients
- Created a Java-based algorithmic execution engine, enabling trading customers to scan for equity and option trading opportunities.
- Integrated the execution engine with various third party trading platforms allowing for automated order entry, increasing trade execution speed and frequency
- Developed a real-time margining engine capable of continuously calculating an expected end-of-day portfolio and day-trade margin requirement based off current market prices across thousands of positions
Technical Challenges
- Options valuation, including theoretical values, volatilities and associated Greek values is computationally intensive. In order to provide real-time analytics across the full market, Symphono developed custom analytics algorithms delivering results far faster than traditional computation methods.
- Leveraged local historical and real-time databases to better equip the broker dealer to contest any potentially incorrect claims from their executing or clearing brokers
- The system needed to process tens of thousands of market data messages per second, identifying all available opportunities and notifying all interested traders without ever falling behind a fast moving market
Envisioned and implemented paradigm-shifting collaboration technology for world-wide user base.
Summary
One of the world's largest banks was faced with replacing a critical vended IRC-based IM and chat messaging platform, as it was sunsetting technology which was no longer supported. Our client wanted to take this opportunity to modernize the technology and expand its capability.
Symphono was hired for our expertise in enterprise collaboration tools. We first stabilized the legacy production system and then moved forward with designing and developing a replacement platform from the ground up to be deployed globally across the bank.
We developed a new application and services tier to augment an XMPP server chosen by the customer to provide feature parity with their current system, while also including new age functionality not found on any other collaboration offering.
What We Did
- Performed analysis on production outages of legacy system and prepared a strategic plan for stabilization to be executed by customer infrastructure management group
- Developed a sophisticated architecture which could accommodate migration off of the legacy IRC-based infrastructure over time, minimizing the transition impact on critical business functions
- Designed a multi-modal UI which supports desktop deployed, web-based, and mobile use cases without the need to maintain and upgrade multiple UI code bases
- Provided solution for compliance archival of messaging and a tool to export compliance data to an existing record review system
- Developed a customization framework which allows for many extensions to UI functionality without the need to re-deploy the application
Technical Challenges
- Building a modern technology based on XMPP while still providing dual-headed connectivity to the legacy IRC based system
- Substantial end user hardware constraints which required creative design of the UI components
- Developing custom HTML5-MVC frameworks to ensure the code base was extensible and easily leveraged by non-Symphono engineers
- Low level manipulation of the HTML rendering engine to best facilitate the multi-modal UI design
Distilled millions of daily messages into informative, automated reports.
Summary
An all-electronic equity options exchange needed to move from the error-prone and time-consuming manual generation of reports based on its matching engine data to a fully automated report creation and distribution platform. The new platform would pull data from a variety of data sources and disseminate the data in a uniform, highly-readable format via email to both internal managers and external customers. The system also needed to support the real time creation of ad-hoc reports to rapidly generate business intelligence.
What We Did
- Defined a robust architecture capable of normalizing the torrent of data generated daily by their matching engines
- Leveraged existing open-source technologies to shorten the length and cost of the project
- Took an iterative approach to report design once the architecture was defined, so replication of existing reports was done in parallel with research on new ones
- Designed scheduled and automatically distributed reports that pull data from both internal and external sources
Technical Challenges
- Large volume of previously compressed, remotely stored historical data that needed to be incorporated into the reporting system
- Architecture capable of processing 2-3 million additional records per day
- Significant bandwidth constraints given the state of the client's network and the volume of data being manipulated
- Client’s in-house development resources were limited, so new report creation processes needed to be manageable with limited technical resources
Provided innovation in collaboration technology to attract new customers.
Summary
Thomson Reuters needed to rapidly deliver innovative collaboration features into their Reuters Messaging (RM) hosted collaboration offering to continue to compete in the market as a premier hosted communications, financial market data, news and information provider.
The Symphono team used its industry expertise and experience in enterprise messaging technologies to provide the architectural analysis, implementation and project management of multiple production releases of the Reuters Messaging client and infrastructure. The new service offerings allowed Thomson Reuters to attract premiere clients to adopt the RM service and replace their legacy collaboration infrastructure.
What We Did
- Completed market analysis and created a business plan for incorporating persistent group chat functionality as the first revenue generating feature in the (RM) hosted service suite
- Engineered the resiliency, reliability and supportability of the platform to be deployed within a global data center
- Provided program management of Symphono, Thomson Reuters and additional vendor teams to deliver multiple production releases of the messaging service integrated across product offerings
- Developed multiple follow-on applications which integrated the messaging backbone to provide robust collaboration features within other Thomson Reuters product offerings
Technical Challenges
- Uniform service oriented interfaces to facade numerous legacy systems supporting a variety of diverse protocols and architectures
- Intelligent chat agents that integrate SIP messaging with back-office trading systems, making use of JMS as a middleware between systems
- Highly available and redundant communication methods on top of inherently non-fault-tolerant protocols, making use of dual connection modes and active/backup logic in the service layer
- Component capable of translating legacy SIP and LCS-based chat communication into XMPP protocol, compliant with standards XEP-0045 and XEP-0114
Created a custom, global task management system which integrates with pre-existing management and business process management infrastructures.
Summary
A market data management team at an international bank relied on an individual's memory and a series of manual processes and tools to facilitate the global sourcing of market data. They needed a way to both streamline their processes and provide improved visibility to upper management.
What We Did
- Created a task management application which enables structured management of the sourcing lifecycle across multiple sub-teams within the market data management function
- Custom reports were provided to help management in gauging productivity and bottlenecks by analyzing the creation and completion of tasks
- Architecture was designed to easily scale to allow for subsequent process automation and/or integration of other toolsets to aid in efficiency
Technical Challenges
- Solution required a flexible architecture able to handle the future automation of entire groups of tasks as the sourcing process evolves
- Documents and contracts needed to be immediately viewable across the globe without an expensive server structure
- Non-invasive reporting framework was integrated into the system to allow for follow-on reports
- Required tight integration with the existing, vended, business process management solution
Created a tool that standardized and simplified portfolio allocation for clients.
Summary
A top tier custodial and asset management bank needed to divest a legacy wealth planning and asset plan creation platform in its private wealth management division and replace it with a system which would be both easy to use and bring necessary standardization to the plans and processes across its diverse group of individual account managers.
What We Did
- Analyzed the current tools and processes and defined the requirements for new functionality
- Designed and implemented a UI to provide asset managers with the ability to identify and persist complex relationships between different kinds of trusts and affiliated accounts
- Engineered complex workflows which allowed managers to efficiently design investment plans, matching potential products to investors, and allocating those assets across the various trusts and affiliated accounts
- Enabled users to export a presentation of the solution/proposal for use in client presentations
Technical Challenges
- Due to limitations in the client's data center and in network access for their geographically distributed asset managers, the architecture provided the smallest possible server side footprint and allowed distributed users to work essentially "offline" with data synchronization happening at certain strategic points in the workflow
- The architecture allowed the client's support and deployment teams to effectively maintain and manage the platform given the infrastructural constraints
Designed, developed and licensed our own scalable, algorithmic options trading system.
Summary
The Symphono Trading algorithmic options trading platform provides customers with access to performance and functionality that was previously available only in proprietary solutions. The open architecture and the frameworks-centric approach to algorithm development enables customers to integrate the platform into their existing technology stack without sacrificing system performance.
What We Did
- Engineered a class-leading ability to control your quoting and algorithmic trading activity through an open API and high-performance, scalable architecture
- Provide option quoting, hedging, auction, and volatility fitting algo development frameworks which enable rapid, yet highly sophisticated algo design and deployment
- Dramatically reduce the hardware footprint required to simultaneously quote hundreds of underlyings when compared to competing vended solutions
Technical Challenges
- Engineered the system to deliver sub-millisecond mean quote generation times at scale
- Handle over 2 million market data messages per second at peak load
- Provide robust Java and .Net based APIs which are leveraged internally within the system and are distributed to customers as part of the core platform
- Support direct exchange connectivity with CBOE, C2, Arca, Amex, Phlx, NASDAQ, and CME
