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Welcome to ​​Adaptive – Trading Technology, built for you.

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The Adaptive journey: how it all started

For financial services businesses, a lot can happen in just over a decade. Initially, we collaborated to build a bespoke FX single dealer platform for a large European bank. Since then, we founded Adaptive, a firm that embodies the spirit of collaboration and empowers clients to take control of their technology and innovation. Adaptive’s journey reflects not only the evolution of our own business but also the broader market trends.
Over a decade ago, in 2012, Adaptive began as a professional services consultancy, helping capital markets firms build custom technology and solve front office complexity through expert consulting, complete custom builds, and staff augmentation. Our USP was clear: leveraging our business domain and technical expertise to enable clients to keep control of their IP, differentiate and break free of vendor lock-in.
Despite the magnitude of change since then, our core mission – transforming capital markets through technology – has remained the same. Just the means of achieving it have evolved.

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The shifting landscape of financial technology

In the early days, proprietary technology was still the preserve of enthusiasts – namely dominant incumbent firms with large budgets and an appetite to outmanoeuvre the competition using technology. Investing in the development and design of their trading technology allowed them to trade faster, and smarter while tackling specific client needs. Most other firms relied on off-the-peg vendor solutions or legacy technology.
In a relatively short time, this model has been turned on its head. Bespoke trading technology is today for the many, not the few. Transformative technologies have converged, know-how has deepened and barriers to entry lifted [stay tuned, we’ll talk about the cloud later] – driving the evolution of our business and the financial services sector overall.

Technological convergence drives differentiation

Adaptive’s story reflects the electronification of markets and the evolution of trading technology strategies across banking, asset management and market infrastructure. Reduced cost, increased accessibility and a greater understanding of the value of trading technology among senior decision-makers have been instrumental to this change.

There have been many drivers of our evolution – but two stand out.

Technology accelerators:

Rather than building from the ground-up every time, we designed a proprietary platform that can be leveraged to rapidly build a wide range of bespoke solutions – from execution venues, to matching engines and broker platforms. We called this technology Hydra.
Why did we, a consultancy, develop a proprietary platform like Hydra? We found that we were repeatedly building the same non-differentiating elements around resilience, latency, throughput and market connectivity. To streamline this process, we rolled these common components into our own tech by creating Hydra as a development accelerator for trading platforms.
Over the years, Hydra has allowed for faster delivery of bespoke trading technology, de-risked builds, has been trialed and tested by dozens of firms and saved significant costs. Crucially, this accelerator significantly reduces time to market and makes building differentiated proprietary trading tech possible.

The acquisition of Real Logic in 2022:

The Real Logic team are the originators and architects of the revolutionary low-latency, highly resilient and open-source technology, Aeron. The acquisition has allowed us to fuel this powerful open-source technology and take pole position in deploying it in innovative new ways – especially with the sight of capital markets firms and exchanges moving to the cloud and requiring the best high performance, fault tolerant infrastructure out there.
Open-source technology has harnessed the hive mind of global developers to create possibilities and solutions that were not possible a decade ago. Cloud technology has also vastly increased the computing power available to firms across the board – removing the need for cumbersome on-premises systems and easing delivery.

A combination of these factors has vastly increased the scope of what we can achieve and has reduced the cost and time taken to deliver complex trading systems. They have transformed how sophisticated financial services firms think about their technology and make our firm what it is today.

Domain expertise meets world-leading technology – the Adaptive of today

Over our history, demand for proprietary solutions has increased. We have combined our ability to accelerate projects with acquiring and building technology foundational to capital markets to set our business apart. Now, our deep capital markets expertise can be summarized in four key areas:

Trading in the cloud: Cloud forms the future foundation of the capital markets technology toolkit and we guide firms at every stage of their cloud journey to de-risk and accelerate cloud transformation. Partnering with the major hyperscalers, running regular cloud performance tests of our Aeron tech and having delivered numerous cloud and hybrid implementations, we enable firms to navigate inevitable disruption.
Bespoke trading technology: In an industry where differentiation is key, we help firms turn their trading vision into a reality. With multi-asset expertise, full-service capabilities and an established track record, we can deliver complete front-to-back solutions to production, in a fraction of the time.
Architecture modernization: A web of intertwined legacy or vendor solutions are holding many firms back. Adaptive can help modernize for scalability, performance, and security looking at tech stack modernization and infrastructure refresh.
Consulting services: Whether clients are looking to modernize, innovate, migrate or integrate, we can deliver on their strategy and help firms navigate capital markets complexity.

As proprietary trading technology reaches pragmatic parity with vendor solutions and firms are increasingly looking to move their trading operations to the cloud, we, at Adaptive, are on the front line of a revolution in markets and trading technology.
In this exciting new era, we are evolving as rapidly as the businesses we serve. To mark this new chapter, we have launched our new brand and website – reflecting our heritage, the evolution of our identity and our future. Where will we be ten years from now? It is hard to tell – but what we can predict for certain is that we will continue to pre-empt and adapt to changing needs – harnessing new technologies and helping our clients to stay two steps ahead.

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