BST Awards 2019: Best Cloud Provider to the Buy Side—BT Radianz Cloud

It’s a cliché to say that buy-side firms have become voracious consumers of data. A cliché it may be, but providing this data is a winning strategy for firms that can provide easy, cost-effective connectivity to that data, which is why BT Radianz Cloud wins this category in this year’s BST Awards. With this win, BT Radianz ends Eze Castle Integration’s four-year winning streak.

Yousaf Hafeez, head of business development for financial solutions at BT Radianz—a private cloud that connects to over 160 exchanges and alternative venues, and over 3,300 providers of applications, services and market data—says the company is positioned to slake the buy side’s data thirst. “We are trying to give the buy side access to more and more content, which they need to help them achieve that elusive alpha,” he says. “And we are doing this by giving them access to more liquidity venues and more data—whether that be real-time, historical or alternative data.”

This year, Radianz added multicast feeds from the Mexican Stock Exchange and the London Metal Exchange; historical data from vendor Activ Financial; and crypto feeds from the Vela platform, in response to interest from buy-side firms. The company also connected to a number of new venues, including APEX, a derivatives exchange in Singapore; crypto assets exchange Gemini; and currency exchange LMAX Digital.

In January, BT announced that it was the first international telecoms company to be licensed to operate in China. For Radianz, this means expanding its existing network of buy-side firms. “That means a lot more liquidity from these firms looking to access data or access venues,” Hafeez explains.

He adds that the needs of firms in China are surprisingly similar to those of firms in the west. “It doesn’t matter where you are in the world—the appetite to consume data is staggering,” Hafeez says. “The more data you can give them that is of value to them, the more they will consume.”