High-Performance Trading Systems and the Future of Rapid Addition at TradingTech Summit 2025
In this exciting episode of FinTech Focus TV, recorded at the TradingTech Summit 2025 in Canary Wharf, host Toby Babb interviews Deepak Dhayatker, the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Rapid Addition Limited. The conversation explores the fast-evolving world of financial technology, focusing on high-performance trading systems, microservices, and the latest advancements in low-latency platforms. This episode provides valuable insights into the future of trading technology and the innovations shaping the industry, offering listeners an in-depth look at the technical and strategic thinking behind one of the leading firms in the space.
The Evolution of Rapid Addition and Deepak's Role in Shaping Its Future
Deepak, who has been with Rapid Addition for three years, brings a wealth of experience from his two decades spent in investment banking. Throughout his career, Deepak has worked on both modern and legacy trading systems, contributing to the development of high-performance solutions for financial institutions. At Rapid Addition, he leads the charge in enhancing the firm's capabilities by offering a platform that allows financial firms to deploy their proprietary intellectual property (IP) within a resilient, low-latency environment built to meet the high demands of financial markets.
Under Deepak’s leadership, Rapid Addition has been able to adapt and innovate, positioning itself as a trusted partner for financial institutions looking to scale and enhance their offerings in an increasingly competitive marketplace. With a focus on performance and scalability, the company has continued to evolve, enabling firms to create and deliver powerful trading systems that can handle the demands of modern financial markets.
Rapid Addition’s platform empowers clients to extend their offerings by allowing them to use the company’s high-performance, low-latency infrastructure. This capability has become even more critical as the financial sector faces increased pressures for speed, agility, and resilience. Rapid Addition’s commitment to pushing the boundaries of technology and performance has been one of the key factors driving its growth and success in recent years.
Microservices: The Key to Agile, High-Performance Trading Systems
One of the key topics discussed during this episode revolves around the shift from monolithic to microservice-based architectures. Deepak, who also participated in a panel at the Summit discussing this very topic, elaborates on how financial institutions are increasingly adopting microservices to build more agile and scalable trading systems.
Deepak highlights that microservices are particularly well-suited to high-performance, low-latency trading platforms due to their ability to offer independent deploy ability. Unlike monolithic systems, where everything is tightly coupled and must be deployed together, microservices allow individual components to be updated or deployed independently. This reduces complexity and improves the overall software development lifecycle. Moreover, by aligning microservices closely with business domain objects, firms can ensure that their tech solutions are highly relevant and tailored to their specific needs.
The shift to microservices represents a broader trend towards increased modularity and flexibility within financial technology. This approach allows organisations to build trading systems that are not only more responsive to market changes but are also more capable of adapting to future technological advancements. With the ability to update and scale individual components independently, financial institutions can reduce risk and improve their ability to innovate, while simultaneously managing the complexity of their systems.
While many discussions around microservices focus on their agility and scalability, Deepak also points out the performance benefits that microservices bring to high-frequency trading environments. He discusses how microservices can be designed to run without state or, when necessary, rebuild the state from snapshots or epochs, ensuring that systems remain resilient and performant under the most demanding conditions. This is especially important in trading environments, where even the smallest delay can result in significant financial losses.
Design Principles for High-Performance Trading Systems
Building high-performance trading systems involves adhering to several core design principles. Deepak outlines the principles that have been instrumental in Rapid Addition’s approach to system architecture, which ensures that the firm’s platform can operate at peak performance even in the most challenging market conditions.
One of the first principles Deepak discusses is the need for a highly optimised messaging transport. In the context of high-performance trading systems, every millisecond counts and ensuring that messages are transmitted quickly and efficiently is essential. Technologies like Aeron Nets, which Deepak mentions, are designed to optimise the messaging layer, reducing latency and improving overall system performance.
Next, Deepak emphasises the importance of designing microservices as stateless, event-driven services. This approach allows trading systems to be highly scalable and fault-tolerant, ensuring that they can continue to operate effectively even in the event of failures or unexpected challenges. By making microservices stateless, firms can ensure that their systems remain flexible and resilient, enabling them to meet the demands of high-frequency trading environments.
Another crucial principle is the removal of non-deterministic behaviour, which can introduce jitter and cause delays in trading systems. Deepak explains how Rapid Addition’s platform achieves this by using thread pinning, thread isolation, and minimising context switching. These techniques help avoid CPU cache misses, which can significantly slow down systems, ensuring that performance remains optimal even under high-load conditions.
In addition to these principles, Deepak also discusses the use of persistent memory and the disruptor pattern between producers and consumers. These design patterns help optimise system performance by reducing unnecessary memory allocation and improving message flow between different components of the system. Serialization and deserialization optimisation are also key considerations, as a significant amount of time is spent in these operations, particularly when dealing with large volumes of trading data.
Finally, Deepak discusses how optimising network performance is essential for high-frequency trading. By using techniques like kernel bypassing and leveraging smart network solutions, Rapid Addition is able to enhance message flow and reduce latency. These techniques, combined with the other design principles mentioned, ensure that the platform can meet the high demands of modern financial markets.
The Shift to Microservices: Efficiency and Productivity Gains
When asked about the advantages of microservices, Deepak stresses that the most significant benefit lies in the independent deploy ability of services. This enables financial firms to deploy updates or modifications to specific components without having to update the entire system, a major advantage over monolithic architectures. This shift not only simplifies the deployment process but also allows for greater flexibility in managing system updates and scaling individual services. Financial institutions are increasingly recognising this flexibility as a key factor in improving operational efficiency and agility.
Microservices also allow organisations to structure their teams around specific services, ensuring that ownership is clear and development is more streamlined. Deepak explains that this organisational model is a huge benefit, as it allows for greater focus and specialisation, ultimately leading to faster development cycles and more efficient systems. By decentralising development responsibilities, organisations can accelerate innovation and reduce the risk of bottlenecks in the software development lifecycle.
The move to microservices is also driving significant changes in the way financial firms approach their technology stacks. By breaking down complex systems into smaller, more manageable components, firms can more easily experiment with new technologies and innovations. This increased agility allows firms to stay ahead of the competition and respond more quickly to changes in market conditions or regulatory requirements.
Adapting to the Changing Tech Landscape
The financial technology landscape is undergoing rapid transformation, driven by several key factors, including performance demands, cloud adoption, artificial intelligence (AI), and regulatory pressures. Deepak explains that financial institutions are increasingly shifting from a "buy versus build" approach to a more hybrid "buy best-in-breed, then build on top" model. This shift allows firms to leverage best-in-class technologies while adding their own unique value on top, creating customised solutions tailored to their specific needs.
This transformation is also evident in the vendor landscape, where financial firms are increasingly seeking out best-in-class technology providers rather than building everything in-house. Deepak highlights the growing importance of partnerships between technology vendors and financial institutions, as both parties work together to create more efficient, scalable, and innovative trading solutions.
Deepak also notes that this shift is driven by performance demands, cost-cutting pressures, and the increasing adoption of cloud technologies. As financial firms look for ways to optimise their infrastructure and reduce costs, many are turning to cloud-native solutions to take advantage of the flexibility, scalability, and cost-effectiveness that cloud environments provide.
Looking Ahead: Innovations at Rapid Addition
As Rapid Addition continues to innovate and expand its offerings, Deepak outlines several exciting initiatives for 2025 and beyond. One key focus is optimising the software development lifecycle to increase productivity and speed. This includes the introduction of AI-generated tools that will streamline development processes and improve efficiency. By incorporating AI into the development workflow, Rapid Addition aims to reduce manual effort and accelerate the time to market for new features and updates.
Another major focus is enhancing the product to run in unstable environments, a challenge that many financial firms face when working with cloud infrastructure. Deepak explains that the goal is to make the platform more resilient, ensuring that it can continue to perform reliably even when cloud vendor infrastructures experience instability. This is particularly important as more financial firms move to the cloud and rely on external vendors for their infrastructure.
Additionally, Rapid Addition is bringing back its FPGA engine, which Deepak believes will be highly beneficial in the low-latency, ultra-low-latency space. This hardware solution is in high demand and will allow financial firms to further optimise their trading systems for speed and performance. FPGA engines are particularly well-suited for applications where speed is critical, such as high-frequency trading, and Deepak is excited about the potential of this technology to further enhance Rapid Addition’s offering.
Finally, Deepak discusses the company’s plans to move towards more cloud-native architectures. This transition will enhance supportability, make monitoring easier, and further improve the overall resilience and scalability of Rapid Addition’s platform. As the firm continues to innovate, Deepak is confident that these changes will provide significant benefits to clients, helping them stay ahead in a rapidly changing financial landscape.
Conclusion: A Vision for the Future of Financial Technology
The conversation with Deepak Dhayatker provides invaluable insights into the future of financial technology and the critical role that microservices, performance optimisation, and resilience will play in shaping the next generation of high-performance trading systems. Rapid Addition’s commitment to innovation and its focus on addressing the evolving needs of the financial sector make it a key player in the fintech space.
As financial institutions continue to navigate the complexities of an ever-changing market, the ability to deploy agile, scalable, and resilient trading systems will be more important than ever. With leaders like Deepak driving the way forward, Rapid Addition is well-positioned to help financial firms meet these challenges head-on.
