Legacy extranet businesses, including the TNS extranet, were originally designed for a different use case than what’s required within today’s trading infrastructure. The technology served us well for decades, but then everything started to change. Demand for high-volume financial trading began ramping up, and those legacy system speeds and resiliency capabilities were increasingly compromised by market chaos and volatility. Latency was a big problem, and every lost nanosecond was a lost opportunity.

Our customers needed more, and we knew something had to give. In 2019 we decided to take a risk and lead the way on the next network paradigm shift. Our mission was nothing less than setting new global standards with the deployment of the first high-bandwidth, ultra-low latency Layer 1 trading solution.

From a clean slate, we leveraged best-of-breed technology and best-practice managed services without the burden of legacy systems, and with the ability to start from scratch with our cloud and telecom service providers. We were the first, and three years later, we’re now recognized as the best with TradingTech Insight’s Best High-Performance Network Award.

While we’re humbled to receive this award from our industry peers, its meaning runs much deeper. This recognition validates our managed services strategy over the last few years, replacing established legacy systems with best-in-class technology and the state-of-the-art in high-frequency financial trading performance. Our infrastructure now supports more than 1,000 financial market clients and multiple exchanges across all asset classes, all within a global, counterparty trading system. Our network is designed and engineered to meet today’s mission-critical demand for connectivity and operational resilience.

We believe the award comes to TNS in no small part because of our more recent experiences succeeding through the extreme market conditions of the pandemic. The sheer complexity, changing network environment, and frenzied technical adoption due to a massive dispersal of workers, connectivity points and supply chains nearly overwhelmed global communications and the economy.

We did it by planning ahead, storing our own hardware inventories, and maintaining 100% availability. We did it with TNS’ service mentality, the willpower of our people, and boots on the ground in all major financial centers around the world. We’re proud to have come through this unprecedented moment in history with flying colors. Our greatest satisfaction is proving our network resilience in the face of financial market disruptions, and coming out of the crisis virtually error-free amid trading volatility that challenged every system, and every one of our competitors.

In setting a new trading standard, we knew we needed to reach global scale, with reliable capacity and without compromising our ability to upgrade and extend our network. In this mission we’ve succeeded and are prepared to dominate with our trademark best-practices and operational resilience in new locations including Stockholm, Zurich, Canada and Australia.

TNS is making its mark and continuing the journey by future-proofing our backbone with direct routes into each global financial center. We’re using multiple subsea cable systems, with plenty of dark fiber in key metro areas to accommodate growth and hyperscale trading volumes. We’ve streamlined and bundled high-performing services in our Layer 1 offering, with 5-85 nanosecond latencies – 10x faster exchange access and order execution than conventional layer 3 solutions.

We appreciate and are proud of TradingTech’s award and recognition. We see it as a culmination of what we saw coming five years ago, and validation of the problem we’re solving today: soaring market data prices, labor costs, and record high trading volumes are straining enterprise resources and accelerating the demand for outsourced managed infrastructure services provider support and collaboration. 

This recognition confirms what our clients have known since TNS was founded more than 30 years ago: We will keep innovating so you can achieve your mission – executing trades on a global-scale faster and more reliably than the competition.

Jeff Mezger is Vice President of Product Management at TNS with responsibility for its managed services for the financial industry. He oversees product development and strategy for market data, online and data center services.