Nasdaq Decodes: Tech Trends 2021

Systems on chips (SoCs) and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are not new, but we are excited by recent innovations in this space. Notably, we are seeing the rise of Advanced RISC Machine (ARM) architecture for central processing units (CPUs) and advancements in graphics processing units (GPUs) and machine learning optimized chips. These innovations allow us to build more efficient trading systems, deliver better performance, reduce complexity, lower the cost of end products, increase profitability and add new features that differentiate our products. They are having a profound impact on our business – and the financial services industry as a whole – especially as the industry migrates to the cloud.

Edge cloud is reducing reliance on centralized processing (processing performed in one computer or in a cluster of coupled computers in a single location), bringing greater scale and performance to consumers in an increasingly connected world. We see myriad practical use cases outside of financial services such as in internet of things (IoT), vehicular and drone applications. In the financial services industry, edge cloud can support workflows designed to evolve customer engagement models and provide deeper insights from data, as well as enable hybrid cloud strategies.

The powerful combination of cloud, federated learning and homomorphic encryption could potentially overcome regulatory and other barriers to sharing and analyzing data for purposes such as fighting financial crime and improving market integrity. The cloud is a neutral, secure infrastructure for internal and external stakeholders to share, analyze and act upon data, and the hyperscale cloud providers have tools to help organizations do it. With federated learning, organizations can share insights without actually sharing data. Moreover, homomorphic encryption is emerging as a technology that can allow organization to share data, retain complete control over who can access or perform analysis on it, and have auditability of that process.

The adoption of the software-as-a-service model (SaaS) in the cloud is rapidly accelerating. Financial institutions and marketplaces are finding that it is much faster and cost effective to onboard clients as well as upgrade products and deliver new ones. SaaS in the cloud contributes to our resiliency and security because it alleviates some of the potential risk of downtime in our own data centers. Deploying infrastructure as code allows us to manage and define the desired state of our technology infrastructure using configuration files, and determine the security configuration before it is deployed in a public cloud.