What have been the major themes of your business so far this year?

This has been a transformational year for TT. In addition to celebrating our 20th anniversary, we unveiled a new brand identity to reflect a new approach to building technology solutions for the professional trading community. A big part of this change centers around our next-generation, fully-hosted trading platform that we expect to launch commercially in Q4. This platform, which is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering and accessible via desktop, browser, and mobile applications, will offer unprecedented accessibility and performance with no back-end infrastructure fees or maintenance. We are excited about the opportunities this platform presents to the market and to TT.

We have also been focusing on growing our existing business on our X_TRADER product line. In addition to adding several key exchanges, including NASDAQ OMX eSpeed and HKEx Futures Exchange, we’ve added new functionality across the board. As a validation of these efforts, we have seen continued growth in our user base, and especially strong performance on our MultiBroker network, having just eclipsed the 25-broker milestone and with significant increases in trading volume on the network.

What has surprised you in 2014?
I am surprised at how accepting the market has been to the new technologies on which our next-gen platform is built. There are certainly those who have their concerns about cloud technologies and the internet in general, but we’ve managed to allay their fears by demonstrating how we’re using these technologies securely and in a way that ensures their data always remains private, and in a way that provides a reliable, resilient architecture able to withstand failover and disaster recovery scenarios with aplomb. And while we’re not surprised folks want to ensure their trading operations are kept safe and secure, we were anticipating more concern than we’ve seen — a testament to the appetite of the industry for new technologies especially in the light of platform consolidation and further scrutinizing of IT spend.

What are your expectations for the duration of 2014?
For the rest of the year, we will be heads-down putting the finishing touches on our new trading platform. The benefit of a SaaS platform such as this, which was built from the ground up to be more flexible and conducive to change, is that what we release in the first iteration is just the start. We will add new exchanges and functionality and we’ll be in a position to respond to user feedback on existing functionality with unprecedented ease. Over the next few months we have some exciting announcements to make regarding the platform, so stay tuned.