AFTAs 2019: Best New Technology Introduced Over the Last 12 Months, Infrastructure—HPR

HPR, which was founded as Hyannis Port Research, takes home the award thanks to its Riskbot platform. The solution performs 80-plus risk checks in 360 nanoseconds, and the company sees more than 10% of the US equity market volume flow through the platform as well as 15% of Australia’s.

But despite Riskbot’s impressive speed, HPR felt that the network switches its systems fed into represented a drag on performance. As a result, the vendor set out to develop a device that would integrate market access, risk management, data and latency capture functionality into a multi-application switch. Through the combination of FPGA-based risk hardware and a network switch within a single device, HPR felt it could create a “net-zero” latency solution by performing risk checks in parallel with switching.

In November 2018, its vision became a reality with the launch of Omnibot.

“Omnibot was HPR’s next step into advanced cloud infrastructure systems. That’s important because the larger sell-side firms are currently engaged in an asymmetric technology race with the market-makers who have their roots in high-frequency trading,” says Tony Amicangioli, HPR’s founder and CEO. “So Omnibot is the first in a series of products and technologies we have introduced to level this playing field.

The company also launched a complementary monitoring technology earlier in 2019 called CRM-X, which provides a real-time, pan-regional view of risk that encompasses all equities markets globally.

“At their core, these two products, along with our Unimus platform, allow incumbent banks and trading firms to move towards a modern cloud trading grid that more closely emulates the service-oriented architectures employed by cloud-native technology companies,” Amicangioli says.

This is the second year that this award has been given out. The inaugural winner was Axioma.