To be successful, a trading platform must – above all else – make transactions as easy as possible for its users. The challenge with this is that ‘easy’ is an ever-shifting concept that encompasses a wide range of factors.
For example, speed is a key component for traders in volatile markets. They need to be able to action a trade at the touch of a button if they’re to protect profitability against price fluctuations. However, expectations in this area change constantly as performance improves – and platforms need to make sure they can keep up.
This isn’t the only area where customer and market expectations are changing rapidly. The increase in mobile adoption among businesses – along with the cultural weight of smartphone use in everyday life – is driving a move towards mobile trading. In 2018, six out of ten traders were using mobile apps to complete trades – a figure that’s likely to be significantly higher now (especially with remote working becoming the norm). Today, traders are demanding platforms that not only help them make transactions quickly and easily but also allow them to do this on the move. ‘Easy’ in trading has moved away from the mouse and keyboard to embrace mobility.
This is the backdrop for LMAX asking Invenica to develop the mobile functionality of its trading platform. Looking to keep up with market expectations, LMAX wanted the ability to provide its clients with an end-to-end mobile solution – all without losing its unique selling point, the speed of its exchange and trading systems.
The idea was to deliver a mobile trading platform that enabled users to easily trade a growing number of complex derivative products. This complexity would be mirrored in the project itself, with the need to meet strict standards in critical areas like financial services compliance and mobile security. The mobile functionality had to recreate the same trading environment as LMAX’s main platform. This meant meeting anti-money laundering (AML) and know your customer (KYC) requirements – a key piece of the puzzle considering that by 2019 a new record of $8.14bn in fines handed out to firms for AML breaches globally.
What we did
Cybersecurity was also a major concern and with the attacks on mobile devices rising dramatically year on year a key requirement. Invenica had to make sure that this new entry point to LMAX’s trading data didn’t create any vulnerabilities for hackers to exploit – especially with no control over the devices being used to access and trade on the platform. The challenge was then providing all of this as part of a high-speed, high-performance platform. Invenica tapped into its considerable experience of complex logic handling over mobile networks, ensuring that this new process was able to match the exchange performance expected by LMAX’s clients. This included the development of protections against any errors caused by mobile networks that might prevent a trade or create conflicting data.
Invenica also worked in tandem with the LMAX development team to track the changes that were continuously altering the architecture and integration services of the main LMAX platform. The new mobile trading environment had to replicate functionality or risk failing to meet users’ needs. Ultimately, the Invenica team planned, designed and executed the delivery of an end-to-end mobile trading platform that retained LMAX’s hallmarks of high speed and high performance. The project took everything that makes LMAX’s desktop platform a leading matching venue for traders and brought it to life in the palm of traders’ hands as part of a simple but effective mobile experience.
What we delivered
The new mobile platform featured full compatibility for iOS and Blackberry devices (even including several models known for presenting a barrier to the implementation of high-performance services).
The completed mobile solution included the following key features:
• Strict Financial Services compliance
• Best-of-breed security using government-approved algorithms
• Protection against errors driven from the mobile network
• Full iOS & Blackberry compatibility
Invenica’s platform was more than able to deliver performance in line with key performance requirements specified by LMAX – succeeding in its aim to make trading as easy as possible for clients.
