HPR Rolls Out Centralized Trading Infrastructure CRM-X

It was Morrissey who said there’s a light that never goes out. HPR, formerly known as Hyannis Port Research, is allowing financial markets to test that theory with the rollout of its new risk management system, CRM-X, which enables users to “follow the sun.”

“The idea of follow-the-sun trading means it’s always on, and you never really have to stop,” says Anthony Amicangioli, CEO of HPR. “You can have a continuous flow of trading as markets open and close around the globe. You’re able to track and watch activity, and pool capital together in a much more efficient way than you did before.”

CRM-X is a pre-, at- and post-trade system that acts as unified global manager of trading across regions, and expands on HPR’s Central Risk Manager (CRM), which operated only in the particular region it was installed. CRM-X comes at the heels of the company’s earlier release of Riskbot, a low latency market access, and pre-trade risk management system.

“The CRM-X is different in that it actually sits over other CRMs, so it’s like a parent-child relationship,” says Amicangioli. “The relationship between CRM-X, Riskbot, and the original CRM is kind of like a hierarchy, where you can have one global CRM watching all of your trading activity across the globe, and that will be connected to children CRMs that manage each region.”

Where business previously had to be handled in regional silos—for example, trading in the US, versus Europe, versus Asia-Pacific—and each having their pool of capital, CRM-X aims to cut out the barriers between those regions and enable more efficient use of the balance sheet.

“If you think about that older structure, it’s kind of like, ‘is there a way I can wind down my business in the US, and then wire money to by Asia-Pacific before it starts trading?’” says Amicangioli. “Then, when Asia-Pac winds down, Europe would begin. What a global central view across the globe begins to do—and what CMR-X allows you to do—is manage that trading entity as if it is one pool of capital. It can tally together all of the money that a given trading entity has.”

If the concept of pooling and automatically syncing data sounds similar to something else—perhaps a cloud—that’s because it is.

“Some of our roots are in cloud technology,” he says. “The infrastructure tends to be a large grid of equipment connected, and it allows you to operate across markets very freely, and that’s what cloud technology empowers you to do. This is very similar in that it begins to form a global trading grid.”

The model the system follows is much like that of tech giants Amazon or Google, which operate on a singular, unified framework and have data centers scattered around the world.

“Picture your favorite major global investment bank,” Amicangioli says. “They’re all trying to be engineering firms at the same time as they’re being global banks. If you think about companies like Google, they focus solely on technology, and it’s getting harder and harder for [banks] and less efficient for them to be building all the various elements they need to support trading infrastructure.”

Expanding upon its services that provide infrastructure for major banks, hedge funds and other management funds to trade on, HPR plans to release a steady stream of products in 2019, including data providing and analytics in addition to risk management.