Principles for Designing Agile Trading Platforms

Today's trading operations face the challenge of maintaining software platforms that supports a constantly evolving business. To keep up with the pace of change, these organisations are demanding more and more of their trading platforms.

Despite their best efforts, IT departments and vendors struggle to address and meet these needs within the costs and timescales required. Problems with large, overrunning software projects have been talked about for many years but the same issues keep repeating themselves. Stakeholders continue to be frustrated by the fact that it takes many months or years to implement features that support their business needs.

A new approach is needed to designing and implementing these large-scale, complex trading platforms. By applying a small number of straight-forward principles, costs and delivery timescales can be reduced and the end product will fit the needs of the business far more closely.