Spread Betting and Contract for Difference Trading

Contract for Difference (CFD) providers and spread betting firms are under incredible competitive pressure, and must offer customers highly personalized, low latency and responsive service to survive.

Solace open data movement technology can help them meet these needs with fast, reliable, globally scalable distribution of event-driven data.

Solace technology connects internal quoting, risk and trading applications to web-delivered front ends so CFD providers and spread betting firms can provide reliable, responsive service under all market conditions.

Solace has helped companies in the spread betting community and online gaming sector improve the speed and reliability of their data distribution infrastructure, including FxPro, Hong Kong Jockey Club, Unibet and William Hill.

Featured Customer: FxPro

“Solace gives us a rock-solid foundation on which we know we can build and grow our business to meet customer demand.”

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Accelerate Market Data and Trade Execution

In the extremely time-sensitive spread betting business, one of the problems firms face is excessive latency between the incoming liquidity providers and pricing applications, risk applications and front end display systems. The latency introduced by hops between different environments and messaging technologies, across long distance WAN links, and by the inefficient routing of data, can add up to significant delays across trading, risk and quoting platforms. This can frustrate customers by causing them to miss short-lived trading opportunities and make them wait for confirmation of successful transactions. It can also introduce the risk of being victimized by trading bots that take advantage of brief periods of inconsistency to conduct latency arbitrage.

By single-handedly handling all information routing between applications and customers, including optimized distribution over WANs, Solace technology reduces latency and simplifies data flows so applications are always in sync and customers get extremely responsive service and confirmations.

Eliminate Outages During Peak Activity

In the CFD and spread betting space, the release of major financial indicators (such as non-farm payroll) can drive sudden and sometimes unexpected spikes in the volume and frequency of trades. These bursts of activity can overwhelm data movement technologies causing latency to climb and applications to slow down or even crash, either of which will frustrate customers and stall prices. This can also lead to the providing firm being picked off in the market.

Solace technology can buffer massive amounts of information during bursts of activity, persisting it for guaranteed delivery and playing it out to systems as quickly as they can receive it, without ever putting back-pressure on the high-speed front-office systems producing the data. This lets them offer fast, predictable performance even during peak market conditions, and eliminates the need to “recover” when the market calms down.

Increase Asset Coverage

One of the ways CFD providers offer value to their customers is giving them access to multiple asset classes, and introducing innovative new services. In fact, many CFD providers and Spread Betters are facing mandates to increase their asset coverage. The need to tie together new data sources and systems, with the associated increase in message flow, can overwhelm inferior data movement infrastructure.

Solace offers the massive capacity and easy scalability it takes to quickly increase asset coverage and pricing, and can act as a “shock absorber” between high speed front-end systems and back-end systems that might struggle to keep up with bursts of trades.

Accommodate Rapid and Globally Distributed Growth

Most CFD and spread betting firms are driven to increase their customer base, especially those active in Asia. Doing so requires a flexible data movement fabric that enables the simultaneous publish/subscribe distribution of massive amounts of information to large and growing numbers of clients.

Solace lets firms serve customers around the globe by more efficiently transporting data over long-distance WAN links. Solace reduces latency and bandwidth consumption by automatically compressing and decompressing messages on the wire, and sending just one copy of each message over the WAN, then fanning it out on other end.