It takes a high-speed IT system to deliver what real-time global currency traders need. FX trading, which use a technique called tick-to-trade, capitalizes on both micro movements and volume. When trillions of dollars are at play, even the smallest changes can produce substantial profits for those who make the right moves. No one knows that better than a Sparks Systems, a financial technology company based in Singapore.
“We need to be in the sub-millisecond space,” Spark Systems Chief Operating Officer Chaitanya Peddada told The Forecast in a video interview at the 2025 .NEXT conference in Washington DC.
“Customers want the best tick-to-trade ratio and the best available price.”
He said the FX markets aren’t like the stock exchanges because they run Monday morning until Saturday.
“Customers expect to see the best prices exactly in real time, no matter where they’re sitting in the world. It’s sub milliseconds, which means it’s microseconds.”
In this video, Peddada explained how, in 2024-2025, Spark moved its entire Singapore data center to run on the Nutanix Cloud Platform to improve the efficiency and scalability of its financial trading platform.
“This allowed us to avoid spending money on our SAN storage devices.”
Spark used Nutanix Move to move from their legacy system to the new hypercoverged infrastructure system.
“We’ve gone issue-free so far, which is a first probably in my career. We haven’t had any migration issues.”
He also talks about the importance of customer support and picking the right technology partners to help build a data management system. Maintaining on-premises infrastructure is crucial for compliance and performance in the tightly regulated FX market.
“We also consume a lot of data, and per day there’s an immense amount of market data that’s going through our systems as well as the client’s proprietary trading data, orders and trade data.”
The company aims to utilize data to provide trading signals to its customers, enhancing their trading strategies. It’s also creating algorithms that can predict future events.
Editor’s note: Read the case study Spark Systems Modernizes High-Velocity FX Trading with Nutanix.
Transcript:
Chaitanya Peddada: It's an extremely competitive space, and the FX markets aren't like the stock exchanges which start at a particular time and end at a particular time. It starts up Monday morning and goes throughout the week right up to Saturday. So maintaining that is extremely important. Customers expect to see the best prices exactly in real time, no matter where they're sitting in the world. It's sub-milliseconds, which means it's microseconds.
Jason Lopez: The largest financial market in the world, the FX market, is a global decentralized network where banks, financial institutions, hedge funds, corporations, and traders exchange the world's nearly 180 currencies at negotiated prices. Singapore-based Spark Systems is a financial technology company that creates and runs high-speed, ultra-low-latency FX trading platforms. Chaitanya Padada of Spark talked to The Forecast about its goal to double average daily trader volume.
Chaitanya Peddada: In order to do that, we have to ensure that we have all of our basics right, which means the software services on our side, the customer support on our side, and most importantly the infrastructure, because that's where it takes a lot of lead time in order to set up the infrastructure, which we maintain. And this year we made the transition to move our entire Singapore data center onto the Nutanix stack, which allowed us to not spend money on our SAN storage devices, which would have to be renewed this year. So we used Nutanix Move to move from the legacy system to the new stack, and we also were able to add in a couple of extra servers to have a much larger stack, and we are ready to service clients or add customer servers up till the end of the year.
We are in a very tightly regulated space, so there are not just regulatory requirements but also requirements imposed by our clients, especially the banking clients, right? They have tight requirements, and these are not just security requirements but even data storage requirements. And that's the reason why we host our own hardware. We don't host customer data in the cloud. And because we have to maintain our own hardware stack, it's very important that we, apart from our own software, which is Java-based technology, we partner with the right partners right from the OS level to the VM level, as well as the entire infrastructure stack.
We host our own software in data centers, which are maintained by us for the customer, which means as soon as the client signs up, within days, if not weeks, they want to start up and start trading right away, right? So, having the right platforms in place, being at the right locations, which are the FX hubs around the world, is extremely important. Apart from that, latency plays a very key factor. We need to be in the sub-millisecond space, right? And those are the sort of benchmarks we use while testing any third-party product. So, whether it's the OS or whether it's the VM solution that Nutanix provides, these are some of the basic test cases that we run through, apart from load testing and other FX parameters.
We also consume a lot of data, and per day, there's an immense amount of market data that's going through our systems, as well as the client's proprietary trading data, orders and trade data. All of this data has huge potential in order to leverage for building TCA systems or AI-enabled TCA systems, right? What we are looking at doing at the moment is to use this data in order to give our customers trading signals before time. We also have a library of algorithms which have predictive capabilities. Now, when we get into the predictive space, it's very important for vendors like us to be able to assist our clients in order to provide new strategies for them, because in terms of predictive AI or algos, we need to really partner with the right customers. The traders are the people who come up with the ideas, but we need to be ready to implement those ideas as soon as possible. So this also allows us to leverage on the cloud technology, which we haven't done so far, but even over there, I think Nutanix is probably the right partner for us to have on-prem services as well as cloud services using the same technology stack.
This was the year we transitioned onto Nutanix in a big way, right? We had initially started off in 2022, experimenting in our London data center, which is a smaller footprint compared to Singapore and Tokyo for us. And this year, we took the decision to transform the entire Singapore data center onto a Nutanix HCI stack. The most interesting thing about this transformation was, as I told you, we have only a small window to do a migration per week. So it's one and a half days per week. And over a period of six weekends, our team managed to transform the entire stack onto a Nutanix HCI stack. We've gone issue-free so far, which is a first, probably in my career. We haven't had any migration issues because there was also a lot of support from not just from Nutanix, but also from Nutanix partners to practice and prep for this migration process.
Jason Lopez is executive producer of Tech Barometer, the podcast outlet for The Forecast. He’s the founder of Connected Social Media. Previously, he was executive producer at PodTech and a reporter at NPR.
Ken Kaplan contributed to this video. He is Editor in Chief for The Forecast by Nutanix. Find him on X @kenekaplan and LinkedIn.
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