Authors: Luca Borella & Karl Moll, FINOS

Highlights

Participants worked across virtual and in-person sessions, including an inspiring in-person coding day at Microsoft’s Times Square office in New York on September 12. Our primary objective was to create functional proofs of concept and reference architectures that address key challenges in financial services - all with TraderX as the "Sandbox Application."

TraderX: A Digital Trading Floor In a Box

TraderX, an open source, cloud-native, and highly modular reference architecture for trading platforms, served as the central integration target during the Tech Sprint. It’s not just a toolkit - it’s a playground for developers to explore and innovate. 

Dov Katz, Lead TraderX Maintainer and Distinguished Engineer at Morgan Stanley, summed it up perfectly:

“I’m thrilled to see TraderX being used as the test subject and example architecture upon which to illustrate all sorts of different ideas and experiments. This is exactly what we had in mind when releasing it and we hope it helps accelerate the innovation and adoption of various new technologies and approaches, both within the FINOS project ecosystem and beyond.”

TraderX’s Key Features:

• Modularity: Allows developers to extend and customize components to meet specific use cases.
• Lightweight Deployment: Capable of running on a laptop, enabling easy local development and testing.
• Integration Hub: Facilitates the integration of multiple FINOS projects, promoting a cohesive ecosystem.

Tech Sprint Use Cases 

The Tech Sprint delivered five impressive projects which were showcased at the Open Source in Finance Forum (OSFF) in New York on September 30 and October 1, 2024. 

• Deploying TraderX Using Radius: Migrating TraderX from Docker Compose to Radius for enhanced scalability and portability. This use case was picked up by Azure CTO Mark Russinovich during his Ignite session (Inside Azure innovations with Mark Russinovich from 31:30). All the Radius-related pull requests from the tech sprint have been merged already, specifically:
  • a Radius application definition was introduced to facilitate the deployment of TraderX using the Radius platform (PR)
  •  GitHub Action workflow to automate the building and testing of TraderX's Docker images was introduced (PR)
  • a vulnerability scanning tool was integrated into the continuous integration pipeline to detect and address security issues in Docker images (PR)
• TraderX Support for Bitemporal Data: Integrating a bitemporal database to efficiently handle time-related business requirements (Fork) (Webinar).
• CDM Integration for TraderX Trade Processor: Enabling TraderX with the Common Domain Model (CDM) to standardize financial product representations. (Fork)
• Climate Scenario Analysis Within TraderX: Generating climate scenarios to assess the impact of physical and transition risks on trading activities (Discussion)
• Banking Trading App Connected to TraderX: Developing a retail banking app that connects customer bank accounts with investment services (Discussion)

For all use cases except Radius, TraderX maintainers expressed a desire not to merge the contributions directly upstream. Instead, they suggested creating a multi-branch artefact manager (work in progress) that would allow users to easily switch between different demos and tutorials.

Participants Insights 

Will Tsai, Microsoft Product Manager (Radius):

"The Tech Sprint was a great opportunity for the Radius team to collaborate with the FINOS community on TraderX and learn more about platform engineering challenges in the finance industry. TraderX provides a realistic microservices-based sample application for the open-source community to learn from, and it is a perfect use case for Radius. With collaboration and support from the FINOS community, we described TraderX via Radius, allowing for easy deployment of TraderX across local, AWS, and Azure environments. We appreciate the opportunity to contribute to the TraderX project and look forward to ongoing collaboration with the FINOS community.” 

Jeremy Taylor, JUXT (Bi-temporal database):

“The TraderX Tech Sprint was a great opportunity for the JUXT team to meet other engineers and FINOS stakeholders in this domain, who share our passion to simplify and showcase modern architectural patterns - certainly a good match for our bitemporal SQL database. Building out the new reporting capabilities in TraderX was an intense few weeks of rapid discovery, design, and delivery, but ultimately a lot of fun. TraderX has real long-term potential as an educational tool.”

Prashanth Ram, Smoothstack CTO (Banking Trading App):

"Your support and engagement have been instrumental in shaping our development journey and learning experience. We are particularly excited about your interest in featuring our banking application, integrated with TraderX trade logic, at the TechSprint event. This vote of confidence in our work is deeply appreciated. Your guidance has enabled us to expand our technical horizons, particularly in developing sophisticated features like the live-feed system with LLM integration capabilities. This challenging yet rewarding project has provided invaluable hands-on experience in working with real-world financial technology applications. The opportunity to potentially collaborate with other teams, including Microsoft and Open Bank Project, further demonstrates the valuable networking opportunities that this partnership has created. These connections will undoubtedly contribute to our professional growth and development."

Next Steps

Building on the momentum of the Tech Sprint, FINOS is supporting two exciting events to further drive innovation in financial services technology:

• Cambridge SupTech Lab Hackathon (Dec 2-8): Focused on bridging RegTech and SupTech to streamline data flows and intelligence exchange, participants will collaborate to develop a cutting-edge API builder for financial supervision, leveraging open standards and tools to revolutionize the regulatory landscape. 
• DTCC Innovate.AI Hackathon (Feb 3-7): This event aims to leverage AI and machine learning technologies to address critical challenges in the financial markets industry. It serves as a platform for industry experts, students, and thought leaders to develop innovative solutions that can enhance efficiency, transparency, and overall performance in financial services.

Both events offer valuable opportunities for enthusiasts to engage in collaborative problem-solving, contribute to open source projects, and drive advancements in the financial services sector.

If you are interested, register directly on the respective websites or reach out to marketing@finos.org and we will be happy to match you with existing teams.