For almost 20 years, the TradingTech analyst “A-team” has set the pace for FinTech excellence in capital markets. With its keen eye on industry trends, the firm’s expert-informed awards criteria recognize vendors that provide exceptional solutions and services across infrastructure, technology and data.

Winning the respected TradingTech Insight USA Award for “Best Managed Services Solution for Trading” confirms the TNS Financial Markets strategy that saw our company deploy the first worldwide ultra-low-latency Layer 1 connectivity network in 2018. We are also highly skilled at responding to accelerating demand for high-volume, high-frequency global exchange trading. Today, the TNS Secure Trading Extranet connects over 5,000 endpoints in what has become one of the world’s largest financial communities across equities, derivatives, futures and options markets.

This year’s award recognizes TNS’ mission-critical managed services, which bring global trading participants together with unprecedented speed, reach and support. Leveraging our specialized Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform, the TNS team delivers tailored solutions that enable firms of all sizes to benefit from services that match business needs including:

  • Access to ultra-low latency market data feeds and exchange order routing
  • Highly engineered in-data center hosting and connectivity
  • Exchange and trading participant global connectivity
  • Secure and integrated cloud connectivity

What made TNS stand out in the managed services category?

First and foremost, we’re solving problems of exchange operational resilience. Managing remote data center space, connectivity and real-time monitoring have become much more crucial to those responsible for business continuity and electronic trading infrastructure. TNS’ specialized managed hosting solutions are engineered to deliver rack-optimized cabling and a design that utilizes our ultra low latency trading Layer 1 technology for direct exchange access inside the data center. This ensures execution speeds up to 10 times faster than traditional Layer 3 architectures. Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology eradicates the need for multiple switches by using a single-hop architecture to deliver connectivity in as little as 5 to 85 nanoseconds.

TNS’ fully managed IaaS saves traders from having to research, acquire, and maintain their own exchange connections, data center space, equipment and employees. This includes market data feeds and round-the-clock access in over 142 exchanges across 30+ countries.

TNS continues to aggressively expand our capabilities. In 2022 alone, we announced market data services for all 16 US equity option exchanges and added multiple new international exchanges including Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE), Borsa Istanbul (BIST), Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE), and Bolsas y Mercados Españoles (BME). Our award-winning managed service provider (MSP) support is enhanced with local regulatory, tax and legal knowledge.

Traders that use TNS’ managed hosting solution are successfully leveraging the company’s global point-of-presence footprint and extensive on-net connections. These include uninterrupted access to multiple exchanges with local, on-the-ground support around the globe bolstered by a network backbone of 125+ points-of-presence. Access is complemented by a growing group of software and cloud service providers who continue to bring hyperscale capabilities to the world’s diverse and often volatile exchange ecosystems.

Financial markets trading in the cloud has quickly evolved into a labyrinth of connectivity options and market data nuances. The need to minimize this complexity has forced the issue for thousands of traders worldwide to partner with an MSP that cuts through the administrative and operational resource burdens with more predictability and precision. Though some exchanges continue to labor and spend on proprietary infrastructure, the traditional do-it-yourself approach is becoming more difficult to manage and scale.

This industry recognition is welcome affirmation of the bet we made in 2019 on managed infrastructure-as-a-service trading. According to a recent survey of CIOs, about a third plan to move more components to MSPs by 2025 in order to streamline connectivity, colocation services, cloud, market data and VPN into a single solutions portfolio.

Thanks to TradingTech for this recognition. With our platform’s performance and productivity gains earning such accolades, the TNS IaaS service has truly arrived as the new standard for comprehensive, reliable and robust low latency trading execution.

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