2022 has been an exciting year for Lucera. What were the highlights for you?
2022 has been an extremely good year for Lucera. Part of our continued growth is due to the expansion of services into our current client base as well as partnering with new firms who either want to revamp their existing technology, expand their footprint into a new data center, access new unique pools of liquidity from our existing operators or test out new client connections through any of our month-to-month services.
In addition, we have worked closely with some of our clients on bespoke functionalities for their systems, proving that we are not just an off the shelf technology provider and rather strive to work with clients on building and molding our offering to cater for what makes sense for their business. In addition, we also gained a foothold in the digital asset space, with some clients using us to trade crypto as well as using us to host their various crytpo applications.
You have recently made three important new hires. Please tell us about those.
It is fundamental for Lucera to have the right people as part of the team. We are therefore delighted to welcome two new hires in the EMEA region with James Cusack heading up our European sales team and Ismail Hussein working as a technical account manager focused on client success.
James brings a wealth of experience to the sales team and we’re excited to see him continue to push Lucera across the EMEA region. Ismail in turn has been a devout user of Lucera technology in the past and we’re excited to bring him onboard as we build out our technical account management team in EMEA and the US. He will be able to use his industry experience to help create effective solutions for our clients.
In addition, we have welcomed Steve Shuster as Product Management in the US. Steve has covered both the trading and technology side of the business and will be a key player both internally and from a client facing perspective.
There is a significant focus on our product roadmap for 2023 and these strategic hires only reinforce our message to the market that we understand the importance of adding the right people to the team, to ensure we capture and deliver what clients are asking us for.
What does Lucera’s product roadmap look like for 2023 and what plans do you have for expanding the company’s global footprint further?
Our LumeMarkets product and increased functionality across asset classes is really the main focus for 2023. Some of the functionality we’re developing includes, enhanced RFS and multi dealer RFQ capabilities, real time margin and credit management functionality including rules-based management of inventory. On the fixed income side, we are building out dealer to client workflow as well as a tool for spread trading. All the above are applicable cross asset.
In the crypto space we’re continuing to add venues, enhance our smart order router and looking to offer crypto algos in the future. We’re also expanding our data centre footprint as we look to build out our hosting business.
2023 will be a busy year at Lucera and we’re excited for these upcoming developments.
In what ways has Lucera been responding to the recent growth in electronic FX trading and ramping up to meet the needs of your clients?
Lucera is always working to ensure the platform is delivering the most optimal performance, both from a latency and throughput point of view. With this in mind, we have recently released some internal optimizations across our infrastructure. While applicable primarily to our clients who use our LumeMarkets product for FX trading, these enhancements have a positive effect across all of our infrastructure; Connect, Compute and LumeMarkets.
