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Nasdaq gives customers real-time data through cloud platform
US stock exchange uses public cloud and APIs to provide investment companies with real-time data on trading activity
US stock exchange Nasdaq is using Amazon Web Services (AWS) application programming interfaces (APIs) to give its investment industry customers access to trading data in real time.
It also provides tools to support its customer development teams using APIs.
The Nasdaq Cloud Data Service (NCDS), as it is known, provides trading businesses with real-time personalised trading data based on their requirements, to support decisions.
The APIs use open source standards and a software development kit to support customers developing systems to connect to the data by removing the need to buy hardware, develop proprietary protocols and invest in leased lines.
“This allows for effortless integration of data from disparate sources, and a dramatic reduction in time to market for customer-designed applications,” said Nasdaq.
Lauren Dillard, head of global information services at Nasdaq, said: “NCDS is a significant advancement in the financial data space, as it uses the cloud to stream important, real-time market data tailored to our clients’ specific needs. Adding the cloud to the data equation through our collaboration with AWS is a big win for investors.”
Nasdaq has worked with AWS for a number of years and has been focusing on delivering data directly into applications, which are available on demand, from anywhere in the world.
The trading sector relies on massive volumes of data to gain insights to support trading strategies. Stock exchanges have invested huge sums of money in making it possible to complete trades in microseconds, to ensure, for example, that the prices for shares are the same when trades are completed as they were when the trades were made.
Read more about cloud in financial services
- The financial services community has gone from being one of the least likely sectors to adopt cloud to becoming one of its keenest users, as regulator attitudes to using the technology have become more accommodating.
- Bloomberg’s CIO for enterprise, Tony McManus, says its clients’ changing attitude to using cloud is changing the way the firm makes its real-time trading data available to the financial services community.
- The CTO and co-founders of UK challenger stockbroking app provider, Freetrade, discuss how Google Cloud has helped them diversify their service offering as user numbers have increased.
Companies such as investment banks also require up-to-date data to make their investment decisions. Cloud computing is revolutionising how data providers in the trading sector and trading exchanges provide real-time data and tools for these companies to derive insights.
For example, financial data giant Refinitiv recently removed the need for customers to use trucks and thousands of hard disks to receive large datasets, by using Google’s cloud.
The organisation – formerly the Thomson Reuters financial and risk business – moved its Tick History database onto a platform in Google Cloud. This enables customers to analyse the data there, rather than having it shipped to them on hard disks.
The database contains a large amount of historical data, with about 5PB of data on trades and quotes from more than 500 trading venues going back to 1996. It adds 4TB-5TB of data every day.
Like Nasdaq’s platform, Refinitiv uses the cloud to provide customers with tools, such as artificial intelligence analytics, to support their search for insights.
