Cloud computing is a vibrant area in the financial-services spaces, as trading and investing firms, order routers and trading venues seek to optimize efficiency via available, convenient, and on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources.
The Beast Apps is relatively new as a cloud provider, but the company is already making waves and has big plans going forward.
“We started out on this path about a year and a half ago, converting from an inter-dealer broker to a financial-technology firm,” said Ashok Mittal, president and co-founder of the New York-based firm. “Cloud, apps, mobility and software as a service are the four pillars on which a lot of innovation and business leads rest. People want to use cloud, and they want to have a decentralized approach of accessing information, which is apps.”
“We looked at the service space in the financial industry, and broke it down into four major areas: data providers, analytics providers, liquidity providers (including sell-side firms, exchanges, inter-dealer brokers, and ECNs), and your traditional, ‘everything else’ service provider which is typically a risk, valuation, and post-trade processing type of platform.”
Ashok Mittal, The Beast Apps
The Beast Apps has landed clients from all four categories, Mittal told Markets Media. Newer firms have readily taken to The Beast Apps model, he said, and notably, more established entities with substantial legacy systems have also signed on. In 2015 we will continue to build on the success that we have already established, and we are also working on three ‘game changers’,” Mittal said.
Mittal first highlighted the Beast App Store, a marketplace for financial apps. “All financial-services providers, whether they are exchanges or ECNs or IDBs, are all trying to see how they can get hold of their ecosystem, how can they bring their vendors and customers together on a central platform that gives them unprecedented business knowledge. We are on that path.”
“The second one that is very interesting to us is cloud-based data delivery,” Mittal continued. “And the third one that we believe is very important, is that we are working with two of the biggest cloud providers, with the concept of building, testing and deploying financial applications within days.”
The Beast Apps’ technology has been used for market data, analytics, trading and straight through processing for global financial markets by inter-dealer brokers and large global financial institutions for a couple of decades.According to the company’s website, “the firm is now taking the battle-tested robust, reliable and fault-tolerant technology to deliver real time, streaming, interactive and sharable applications, The Beast Apps, into desktop, browsers and mobile devices like smart phone and tablets effectively.”
Mittal has more than 25 years of IT experience, with last 18 years in the financial industry, building and managing real time, 24×7, market data, analytics and trading solutions for over the counter derivatives, bonds and equities instruments. From 2002 to 2005, he was a senior technology officer at Tullett Liberty and from 1997 to 2002 he was a senior vice president at Beast Financial Systems. The Beast Apps president and co-founder is Vinayek Singh, a 25-year veteran of the OTC derivatives space.