BBVA creates market information infrastructure on AWS cloud

BBVA has created a cloud-based platform to give its share traders access to real-time market data and the ability to handle huge datasets.

The Spanish bank’s investment banking unit has worked with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and market information provider Bloomberg to build the platform, known as BBVA C-Fit.

Traders will be able to manage the data directly on the platform, which BBVA describes as “another step forward in its digitisation journey”.

The platform uses technologies such as Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service and Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka with Bloomberg’s B-PIPE to provide real-time direct access to market data over the cloud.

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 share prices are the same when trades are completed as they were when the trades were made.

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.

Some datasets are so large that companies have to transport the data on hard disks by lorry, but cloud computing offers an alternative.

Roberto Vila, global head of equity at BBVA, said this was another example of BBVA’s efforts to transform the equity business.

Cory Albert, global head of cloud strategy for Bloomberg’s enterprise data business, said: “Cloud adoption in the financial industry has evolved such that access to reliable, high-quality data delivered in real time is the new baseline. With worry-free cloud access to B-PIPE’s market data, BBVA’s development teams can focus on scaling their projects to provide analytics that would be difficult to attain in an on-premise environment.”

With vast tech expertise and experience, businesses in the trading sector will continue to push the cloud deeper into their organisations.

In April, US stock exchange Nasdaq said it was using AWS application programming interfaces (APIs) to give its investment industry customers access to trading data in real time.

Earlier in the year, financial data giant Refinitiv removed the need for customers to use trucks and thousands of hard disks to receive large datasets by using Google’s cloud.