Goodbye 2018, another Award-Winning Year!

Authors: Olivia Bryant-Shaw, Marketing Executive – UK & Roy Johnson, Marketing Executive – the Americas

This year has been an exciting and groundbreaking year for BSO. We’ve been busy growing and improving our network, as well as expanding our presence throughout the world.

In January we went to Orlando, FL for our annual BSO Kick Off. This involved a week of team-building and strategy for the rest of the year and involved all employees of BSO. The week highlighted the importance of teamwork throughout M&A activity, and supporting our clients, as well as strengthened our relationships with each other.

If you want to get to know our team a bit better, read our pieces on Jason Pavey, our Global Field Operations Manager, Romain Mazet, our Senior Technical Consultant, and Jamie Fyffe, our Account Manager.

Award wins

This year was another award-winning year. In June we were recognised at the 2018 Intelligent Trading Technology Awards for the second consecutive year, winning the Best High-Performance Network Services award. Being acknowledged by the financial trading community for two consecutive years is humbling and we’d like to extend a warm thank you to everyone who voted.

We also sponsored an award at ITT – the BSO award for Fintech Innovation. The award acknowledges excellence in innovation expressed by business start-ups and new market entrants to the trading and technology sector and the winner was Market Earlybird, who help financial professionals consume news in a relevant and convenient way through Twitter. Their software is already in use or being tested in the worlds’ top 20 global banks.

Recently we won the Best New Connectivity Product award at the FOW International awards. The FOW awards recognises the very best achievements from across the global derivatives market. Our CEO, Michael Ourabah commented on our award-win,

“We are delighted to have been recognized by the FOW judging panel for our continued commitment to creating ever faster, ever more reliable networks for the trading community. During 2019 we will continue to work with our clients and partners to extend our coverage and reduce latency on our networks.”

FX Report

This year in finance, there has been a lot of focus on cryptocurrencies, and the growth in Asia.

In May we released a report, in partnership with the Realization Group, that focuses on the two key trends in the FX landscape – the growing popularity of Asian currency markets and the whirlwind growth of cryptocurrency trading.

Our CEO, Michael Ourabah provides key insights along with Societe Generale’s John O’Hara, Eddie Tofpik of ADM Investor Services International Ltd, ING’s Stephane Malrait, Ramy Soliman of Stater Global Markets, Tom Higgins of Gold-i and R5FX’s Jon Vollemaere.

Read our Future of FX report, and watch the video interview with the panelists here.

New partners & products

In January we acquired Apsara, a leading supplier of RF connectivity. Our CEO, Michael Ourabah, commented on the acquisition:

“Being able to deliver the next generation of trading infrastructure through this acquisition truly cements our market leading position. Abry’s proven experience and additional capital has been pivotal to making this deal happen, and to providing us with the resources needed to accelerate our future expansion plans.”

This year, was definitely a year of partnerships for BSO, starting with our partnership with Hoptroff London, the time-synchronisation software experts, which provides the financial services community with the first fully traceable accurate Time-as-a-Service (TaaS) on the market.

As India is a key market for us, we were delighted to sign a joint agreement with India INX , and so became the first global network provider to offer direct connectivity to the exchange. We welcome the India INX initiative at GIFT city and we enjoy working directly with the exchange.

Recently, we’ve partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS).  As an official AWS technology partner, we’re delivering high-performance, reliable, secure, direct private connectivity to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud from multiple data centres, offices and colocation environments via the dedicated AWS Direct Connect Service (DCS).

We also became the first network provider to launch a crypto-friendly network infrastructure to traders, exchanges, financial institutions, fintech startups, or regulators looking to understand this complex market.

We partnered with Kaiko, to deliver real-time low-latency cryptocurrency market data, starting with Gemini, the crypto exchange founded by the Winklevoss twins.

Expansion

As a global company we aim to support our clients all over the world so we introduced many new people to our team this year including Matthew Lempriere, our Head of APAC and Middle East, who has been leading our expansion into Dubai, Hong Kong and Singapore, and we also invested in our operations team to ensure we continue to provide excellent customer service.

We made improvements to our network this year, with a revamp on our route between Hong Kong and Singapore; added a new route that provides direct connectivity into BMV Mexico, as well as direct connectivity between Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE) and London.

We have also bolstered our network footprint in Toronto to support the North American trading community with the lowest latency routes between the Canadian city and New York and Chicago.

To next year

This year has been the 14th year of service for BSO, and we’re thrilled to move into our 15th. We want to thank everyone who helped us achieve this success, and can’t wait to see what 2019 has in store for us.

Like what you’ve read? See how you can benefit and talk to the team today.

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