Jennifer Nayar is President and CEO of Sterling Trading Tech.

What were the key theme(s) for your business in 2022?

In 2022, there was a clear trend of vendor consolidation by capital markets participants. Our clients turned to us to reduce costs and improve efficiency as they brought more of their needs under one roof.

We also built more advanced functionalities in our OMS, for increased scalability and throughput – as well as employing an API integration to easily plug into users’ existing systems.

Additionally, with international firms increasing demand for access to trade in the US markets, we onboarded some key international clients, including Avenue Securities, a U.S. digital brokerage serving retail investors in Brazil.

What are your expectations for 2023?

Looking forward to 2023, we expect the new year to usher in increased demand for after-hours trading, as well as continued vendor consolidation.

We see a very positive outlook for growth in our OMS and Risk & Margin System business as we help our clients navigate the choppy waters of today’s market conditions (volume and volatility).

What trends are getting underway that people may not know about but will be important?

The ability of market participants to take on more control themselves is very significant. An example is connectivity via REST API, used in our OMS allowing clients to set and update pre-trade risk controls, and manage and interact with order flow and positions in real-time.

Similarly, we see more demand for Risk & Margin in one system, offering comprehensive coverage and rich analytics capabilities. Our offering is robust with a spectrum of features that include a real time, post-trade market risk and regulatory margin haircut calculation system, delivered via a flexible and modern GUI.

What are your clients’ pain points and how have they changed from 1 year ago?

The perennial “buy-vs-build” dilemma remains top-of-mind for our clients, but recently we’ve seen a real swing to the “buy-and-build” hybrid as we work closely with our clients as their technology partner to help them achieve their goals.