Waypoint - Tackling the Rising Complexity of Trading Environments

First published in FinanceFeeds.

As trading firms face growing demands for speed, resilience, data access and operational efficiency, infrastructure has become an increasingly important source of competitive advantage. Against this backdrop, Waypoint Trading Solutions, a TNS business, has recently launched, combining the strengths of TNS’ Financial Markets business and Radianz. These two industry leaders are now a single organization focused on delivering high-performance infrastructure for the global financial markets, providing firms with the access to the destinations and data they require to be successful.

FinanceFeeds talked to Tom Lazenga, President of Waypoint Trading Solutions about the reasons behind the rebrand, what’s changing, what remains and how Waypoint is helping customers to overcome the challenge of managing increasingly complex trading infrastructures.

Q. Waypoint Trading Solutions brings together two large, established trading infrastructure platforms under a single business. Why did you want to bring these capabilities together under one, new name?

We decided to re-brand in order to create a clearer platform for connectivity, trading infrastructure and market data operations worldwide. We have capabilities across three solution areas – Radianz, Xpress and Sentinel. Radianz provides global trading connectivity through the world’s largest financial extranet, Xpress delivers a managed low latency platform for high-performance access to global exchanges, and Sentinel provides fully managed market data solutions that support complex market data operations at scale. Our new brand positions these three pillars as one business, with a unified tech stack across all our services. This provides a seamless offering to clients and a simpler, more predictable way to run their trading operations.

We chose the name Waypoint – a navigation reference point used to guide complex journeys – to reflect the role the business plays in modern trading infrastructure, helping financial institutions navigate increasingly complex trading environments.

Q. Access to the right technology platforms and services drives competitiveness for brokers. How does Waypoint support this? 

Waypoint helps brokers reduce cost and complexity across every element of market data related spend and support, including hosting, connectivity, middleware distribution, market data usage and incident management. An important aspect of the Waypoint strategy is remaining agnostic to the market, by supporting all normalized feed providers and market data vendors.

Q. What is the biggest challenge you are helping customers with?

Financial trading has changed significantly over the past decade, in part due to the volume and importance of data. Additionally, for many firms their infrastructure has grown over time, shaped by new requirements, new markets and new technologies, often lacking strategic oversight. What was once manageable complexity is becoming something harder to manage and control. This can slow the deployment of new strategies, particularly where infrastructure needs to be configured across multiple environments. We can take this complexity away for clients.

Q. How is Waypoint using AI to deliver trading advantage?

Waypoint is embedding AI and automation pragmatically across its unified platform. Rather than pursuing AI for its own sake, the company focuses on areas where it delivers clear, immediate operational value. We have a product that manages the thousands of exchange-driven data update notifications global trading firms receive annually. Each of these notifications potentially impacts trading systems and we’re enhancing that product with AI capabilities to categorize and assess the impact of each notification. AI tools also support internal operations such as automated network change validation, intelligent route identification and incident impact assessment.

Q. How extensive is Waypoint’s connectivity ecosystem?

Waypoint supports connectivity to more than 180 exchanges and over 6,500 financial market endpoints. It operates one of the industry’s most extensive connected trading ecosystems spanning more than 70 countries and is used by 1000+ financial institutions worldwide to run mission-critical trading and market data environments.

Q. What are your plans for the Waypoint business?

Under the Waypoint brand, the underlying infrastructures for TNS Financial Markets and Radianz will continue to operate independently, allowing customers to access the strengths of both environments. Our focus moving forward is to build on these strengths, with ongoing investment, ensuring that we remain at the forefront of the trading infrastructure industry. We are making the transition between these businesses as seamless as possible for clients. Our innovation will come from developing a unifying technology stack built from the ground up.