About the Customer
Alpha Capital Markets Group Ltd. (ACM) specializes in providing B2B solutions for the industry covering liquidity, risk management, front and back-office, white label and omnibus systems giving their partners market leading technology solutions without any competition from its provider. ACM is run by industry veterans with years of experience and are always on hand to help create the perfect solution for its partners.
After starting work with Devexperts in 2014, within three years they white-labeled their B2B trading platform to dozens of brokers, becoming widely known in the world of liquidity providers, leading to interest from big players in the online financial gaming industry. Their long-lasting connection with Devexperts made it possible to launch a multi-asset trading platform over a short period of time.
ACM was acquired by the TradeTech Group in 2017, renamed to TradeTech Alpha and is now part of the financial division of Playtech (LSE:PTEC), a market leader in the online financial gaming industry.
The team at Devexperts works side by side with our team to ensure that our IP and customizations are delivered within a short time frame and with enterprise quality.
Muhammad Al-Amin Rasoul, CEO of ACM
Business Challenge
The main challenge for Alpha Capital Markets (ACM) was to quickly make their way into the highly competitive business of multi-asset liquidity provisioning. As a non-bank market maker with unique intellectual property amassed over the last two decades, implementing this in an efficient and short time frame was critical. In order to get there, they needed technology with the most advanced set of dealing settings and risk management features. In addition, they had to find a vendor familiar with the business challenges of a liquidity provider. The vendor was also required to understand which software components should be deployed in the first place to make the whole thing work. In order to avoid sacrifices in product quality or production time, the apparent solution to the company was licensing a ready-made technology from someone they trust. This started a new cycle of collaboration between the Alpha Capital Markets team and Devexperts.
Solution
The core of the solution that Devexperts provides to Alpha Capital Markets is DXtrade Enterprise, a multi-asset trading platform. It is a full stack technology consisting of customer-facing GUIs for web, mobile and desktop, dealing, risk management, and back office integrations with the client’s internal portals. ACM then took this platform and integrated ACM’s unique intellectual property revolving around pricing, order management, surveillance, and order execution into DXtrade Enterprise. ACM and the Devexperts team worked side by side in an Agile like environment.
To ensure that the time-to-production criterion is met, Devexperts customized an existing proprietary technology. This customized technology was suitable to the business strategy of both an OTC liquidity provider and a B2B trading platform vendor. Among the assets that can be traded in the platform, there are Spot FX, CFDs, and Spread Bets.
To effectively integrate the platform with retail brokers, Devexperts had to provide a highperformance FIX gateway solution. In the infrastructure of Alpha Capital Markets, FIX gateway supports a massive order flow. This order flow comes from dozens of brokers that use off-the-shelf products from other renowned vendors and proprietary platforms. To ensure such an intense order flow is processed, Devexperts has also provided flexible order routing and execution solutions.
Market making is extremely sensitive to latency. To this end, the customer emphasized the importance of fine-tuning order processing. The system was so complex that our engineering team invested in a full-blown custom latency monitoring system that could present each stage of order execution separately. That allowed us to find all the bottlenecks and address them. We also implemented a new process for regular performance testing, which helped ensure no latency issues were introduced before changes went live. We achieved and kept an ultra-low latency despite the growing number of orders and instruments.
Eugene, Head of Delivery Unit at Devexperts
As dealing and risk management operations are crucial to liquidity providers, the solution incorporates dynamic A/B/C-Book order distribution by client profile, instrument, trading session, and many more categories.
Results
The resulting solution provided by Devexperts is a multi-asset trading platform for the OverThe-Counter market, which:
- supports thousands of instruments
- operates in both institutional and retail modes
- includes a REST API for B2C connections
- is capable of processing thousands of orders per second with a daily turnover of billions USD
- has an established on-boarding process for FIX API partners