Financial companies face strict regulatory requirements when trading stocks and bonds electronically. A new version of Software AG’s financial application development software hopes to make it easier for them.
Software AG has just released version 9.9 of Apama Capital Markets Foundation (CMF). It is a development platform for trading applications that deal with the capital markets, and it now includes features that will help applications prevent companies from breaking the rules when they trade electronically.
Capital markets are one side of the financial industry, focusing on long-term capital which trades via securities such as stocks and bonds. The technology on the pending capital markets has developed at a breakneck pace, with innovations such as algorithmic trading emerging, in which software makes the decisions about what securities to buy and sell, and when.
The new version of the Software AG product will appeal to financial companies that want to build their own capital markets trading applications, but don’t want to start entirely from scratch. It’s a collection of software libraries that lets them bolt together the basic frameworks for their financial applications. They’ll use it for solutions like risk and compliance monitoring, order management, and the collection and processing of market data.
The new version features several enhancements, but the main one is the inclusion of predictive analytics. Software AG has based the product on Apama Streaming Analytics, which is designed to translate real-time data streams into actionable information. Folding the analytics capability into CMF will enable financial firms to identify and predict events in capital markets. They might be able to predict a client breaching the rules governing these complex markets.
What rules are we talking about? In the U.S., the significant rule to watch is the Market Access Rule, implemented by the Securities and Exchange Commission. This is designed to ensure that broker-dealers enforce risk management controls to keep customer transactions within capital thresholds and ensure that orders are accurate.
In Canada, its equivalent is National Instrument 23 – 103 Electronic Trading. This was implemented in 2012 by the Canadian Securities Administrators, which is the collection of provincial securities regulators that govern trading in the capital markets north of the border. It is similarly designed to manage the risk associated with electronic trading.
The second most significant feature in Apama CMF will appeal more to IT staff managing infrastructure: the product now supports Docker containers, enabling them to build capital market applications that run on premise or in the cloud.
Other features in the new version of CMF include a new version of its query designer that lets business analysts ask the software questions more easily.