Please remind us about the range of products and services that Pico provides and the types of clients you currently service across the capital markets?
The continued electronification of markets across all asset classes has given rise to the need for global access and connectivity to all liquid and electronic markets and the ability to get data from anywhere to anywhere. With the exponential growth in trading volumes and data rates, there is a heightened focus on having a high capacity and resilient network for running robust and timely consumption of data. All this is combined with a need for transparency, visibility and monitoring of high-performance infrastructure, networks and data.
Pico supports clients to navigate these market trends with our comprehensive global ecosystem of best-in-class technology and services that connects and enables the global trading community across all electronic markets and asset classes. Today, our technology and services, powers mission critical applications for more than 420 clients, including leading banks, exchanges, asset managers and trading firms globally.
We’ve built a fully managed private and public cloud infrastructure for financial markets participants with exchange connectivity spanning 52 global market centers in the Americas, Europe and Asia. Our high-performance, low-latency resilient proprietary network, connects all major financial data centers with access to major public cloud providers, enabling us to offer any financial market data anywhere to clients.
The combination of our global infrastructure and data services with our analytics and machine intelligence solution Corvil Analytics, contributes to clients being equipped with cutting-edge solutions to meet ever-changing market conditions.
Why are increasing numbers of trading firms choosing to work with Pico?
We’re privileged to sit at the center of the financial ecosystem serving a broad range of client segments. What’s differentiating for clients is our global comprehensiveness, our operational excellence, as well as our best-in-class technology platform coupled with our unrivalled infrastructure network monitoring and trade analytics solution, Corvil.
In addition, our expertise in the trading business, market structure, data, regulatory compliance requirements and how to apply technology solutions makes us a valued partner to our clients. Lastly, we are seeing clients generally want a single global technology partner rather than various vendors in multiple regions. This, as well as our ability to add more products and services on top of our infrastructure is why so many clients choose to work with us.
What made Redline such an attractive proposition and good fit for Pico?
Acquiring Redline was a tremendously exciting milestone for Pico. There were three main factors driving our decision including their exceptional and high-performance software solution for market data consumption along with order routing, the highly talented Redline engineering team and their unique client base.
Redline’s coverage spans equities, options, futures, FX, crypto and fixed income, and their growing list of clients includes global and regional banks, quantitative hedge funds, ETF and FX market makers, exchanges, and other electronic trading firms.
Redline is an award-winning provider of ultra-low latency and high-performance solutions for order execution and market data via feature rich APIs. While Pico offers over 300 global data feeds, these raw exchange feeds are published through numerous different protocols. Redline’s software simplifies the consumption of these exchange data feeds through a common software API.
Since 2011, Redline has partnered with us on multiple joint client initiatives, and they have a true understanding and appreciation for our service model and our approach to client engagement.
The addition of their multi-asset software solutions now gives clients access to a common API for global markets, both real-time and historical delivered over our network with performance underpinned by Corvil Analytics.
How does Redline support FX trading?
Redline has long been the market leader in ultra-low latency FX Aggregation and Execution components. These solutions are used in Tier 1 banks eFX infrastructure, quantitative hedge funds and proprietary trading firms to achieve the best performance in the market.
In 2019, they invigorated their innovation in higher level FX focused products to support these clients. In 2020 they launched Redline Algo Trader for FX, a broker-neutral solution that gives traders full control over their individual liquidity pool. Clients can now benefit from sophisticated execution algorithms that are built with and on top of Redline’s ultra-low latency trading software.
Adding to the trading suite of products are two other products: Pre-Trade Risk (PTR) and Redlines Market Simulator. The former being a fully integrated risk control layer, which can allow a firm to express their full risk limits on a trader, group and/or firm-wide level. Leveraging PTR allows firms to set strict risk limits that are monitored and enforced in real-time before orders are sent out to the market.
For firms that require research, whether for alpha seeking strategies or building custom execution strategies, Redline Market Simulator is also an invaluable tool. A fully deterministic backtesting engine, with a powerful set of tools and analytics, it gives quants and researchers an invaluable toolkit to identify successful strategies.
Pico’s vision is to become a leading provider of technology, software, data and analytics solutions to the financial markets. Why do you think this acquisition marks a very important milestone in your growth strategy?
In the last few years, our clients have tested trading and data solutions in our lab and Redline consistently came out on top as the highest performer while covering the full range of client functional needs. So, the acquisition gives us a stellar software offering and even greater in-house engineering technology expertise to drive innovation.
Ultimately, this is about continuing to meet and exceed clients’ performance requirements through best-in-class solutions. The addition of their software solutions will both complement and transform our existing offerings and enable us to deliver greater value and services.
How do you see your collaboration with Redline developing further in the future and what can we expect to see next in terms of new products and services from Pico?
Clients want access to global borderless trading and data access. Redline’s premier software solutions with Pico’s broad infrastructure, cloud and data offering, and industry leading Corvil Analytics, positions Pico uniquely to address these client needs and market challenges.
We’ve already expanded Redline’s normalized market data portfolio with the addition of two China markets (Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges).
We are also in the process of integrating Corvil Analytics telemetry into the Redline stack which will provide clients with unparalleled performance and transparency to optimize the trade stack and assure market data quality.
