Ben, please tell us a little about the history of Celer Technologies.
Celer was founded to be a flexible piece of software that can operate in multiple financial markets and service a wide range of clients. When it was founded, everything in the market was a workflow solution that did A to B, there were no A to D or D-Z graph-like workflows. There was also nothing that was developer-friendly that had multiple API connections and could be customised to a client’s requirements. With Celer we started to fix these issues. Coming from the futures and FX world gave us a great understanding of how markets operate and how the software should act in those markets.
What range of products and services do you offer, and how much of the trade lifecycle do you support?
Currently, FX is the main business but we also support commodities and commodities on FX. Our new solution for commodities on FX is a game-changer for our clients who want to price commodities in localised currencies and auto create swaps out of those flows giving them an automated risk management solution. We also offer base metals, fixed income and some direct equity DMA and traditional futures and options.
Celer has clients all over the world. What types of firms are you providing solutions for?
We work mainly with banks and brokers and also anyone providing services for retail FX.
Let’s talk a little about the Celer Technologies framework and how your platform has been engineered. What were you trying to achieve with building this, and how have you gone about it to ensure maximum flexibility and high availability?
The technology is built around a central digital directed graph. We wrapped a common API that supports multiple languages around the graph and that allows clients to customise the internal vertices and external components of Celer. This design gives a great degree of flexibility and allows clients to customise their Celer solution. Clients can build new modules on top of their Celer infrastructure, allowing them to improve their internal processes by using a solid institutional-grade framework.
All of your products are modular. What advantages does that have for clients?
With our modular framework approach clients can communicate using 1 of the 3500 API connections we have. This allows for great flexibility but also for new releases and deployment, so you can upgrade modules on their own. You don’t have to take the entire system down. It has been said this has been done before with micro-servicing design, but generally it always breaks in the traditional sense. Our type of modular architecture is custom-built and has been designed over years of deployments and working with our clients to really improve the service and software. Partnership is really a big thing for us, we want to be involved with our clients to help make their business better.
What can you offer for firms where very high speed is a key requirement?
Throughput and speed are at the heart of what we do. We’re processing prices in under 100 µs and getting them filled at an LP in under 800 µs and that’s a true representation of the latency involved. When I hear people say that they are under 100 µs latency, it’s fine doing it with code, but doing it in a hedge and back-to-back in the market is a totally different thing.
What level of support do you offer for clients?
We built a Follow-the-Son model and operate from the east coast of the US right the way through to Singapore. Developers, support, and technical account managers in each region allow us to effectively follow an audiobook or a list of issues or client upgrades around the world, therefore giving clients a 24 x 7 trading environment.
What work have you been doing to add to your existing range of modular products and what projects are in the pipeline over the coming months?
We do R&D every single year. We’re constantly developing; our release cycle is every two weeks, and we cut the code to clients every 3 to 4 weeks, giving them maximum bang for their buck. When they pay for Celer, they want to see it improve and we want to deliver new solutions, new ideas, and new solutions so our clients can capture more market share. Our release cycle is automated and human intervention taken away. We spent many years perfecting this. This year 2025 is commodities and base metals, next year is more Machine Learning and automated trading solutions to help clients increase P&L and price efficiency.
Why are more trading firms than ever before being drawn to your offerings and what are they telling you about why they like working with Celer?
I think firms trying to build a solution like Celer soon realise the scale and complexity that is ahead of them. When they see Celer and its true form, they realise that they can take a base platform, customise it to the way they want, and deliver it to their clients as their own. Without anyone knowing that it’s Celer and giving them a true edge over their competitors.
In the past, you have talked about ‘Transformative Trading Technologies’. What did you mean?
We transformed the trading environment by providing modular solutions to clients. It’s developer friendly, trader-friendly, and can be customised and built on by a client. There’s nothing like this. Our objective is to make clients more money and bring them new solutions to enter new markets. We change their unprofitable flow into a profitable flow, and help them in increasing their revenue and their market share.