KX Helps Global Asset Manager Replace Start-of-Day Snapshots With Real-Time Data on OneTick Cloud

HOW ONE OF THE WORLD’S LARGEST ASSET MANAGERS REPLACED A CORE-LIMITED, BESPOKE ARCHITECTURE WITH AN ENTERPRISE-WIDE REAL-TIME DATA PLATFORM ON KX

The Customer

The customer is a US-headquartered global asset manager, among the largest in the world, serving investors across index and active strategies. Its investment and trading operations span four internal groups covering equities, fixed income, quantitative equity, and capital markets: different mandates, but a shared dependence on accurate, timely market data. The firm has run on KX for more than a decade, and is now extending that footprint from end-of-day analysis into intraday, real-time decision making.

The Challenge

The firm’s existing environment was built for a start-of-day world. As the firm’s ambitions moved intraday, the architecture became the constraint:

• A static, bespoke architecture built on duplicate-loaded T+1 end-of-day archives, alongside a single-region real-time ETF spread setup
• A hard ceiling of 42 compute cores divided across three separate groups, with no way to scale up during high-volume periods or market volatility
• On-demand access to global tick data for transaction cost analysis (TCA) and other T+1 use cases that was difficult to deliver at the scale the desks needed
• A vendor feed architecture for Bloomberg, ICAP, and MarketAxess that needed to be optimized for licensing cost while still delivering real-time streams
• No way to calculate analytics strictly on demand rather than continuously, and no way to stop or freeze a stream for point-in-time analysis
• Multiple investment groups to serve from one environment, without the licensing and provisioning friction of separate product schedules

Why the Firm Chose KX

Following an evaluation that spanned all four investment groups, the firm chose to consolidate on KX because of:

• More than a decade of relationship history and accumulated institutional knowledge of the firm’s environment
• Deep capital markets expertise and an architecture designed specifically for market data
• Strong Python support through the OneTick Query Python API and Query Designer, matching how the firm’s quants already work
• Proven scale, with capacity to handle more than 12,000 securities across equities and ETFs
• Cloud deployment in a hosted, dedicated AWS environment
• A commercial structure that could co-term three existing product schedules under a single enterprise-wide unlimited-core model

The Solution

The firm now runs OneTick Cloud with Bring Your Own Data (BYOD) in a dedicated AWS environment, under an unlimited-core enterprise license. The platform supports:

• Real-time streaming analytics from Bloomberg B-PIPE, ICAP, and MarketAxess feeds
• T+1 historical tick queries alongside real-time streams, from the same platform
• Portfolio basket calculations, including simulated ETF spreads
• Custom VWAP calculated strictly on demand, rather than continuously processed
• The ability to stop and freeze a stream for point-in-time analytics
• Ingestion of the firm’s own custom reference and static data through BYOD
• Research and query workflows in the OneTick Query Python API and Query Designer
• Warm disaster recovery within the AWS environment, with a 60-minute recovery time objective

The shift from a bespoke design to a BYOD model changed the economics as well as the architecture. Instead of duplicating end-of-day archives and licensing feeds group by group, the firm brings its own data into a single hosted environment and optimizes vendor feed collection once, for everyone. Co-terming three existing schedules under one unlimited-core license removed the 42-core ceiling entirely, so calculations scale with market conditions rather than against a fixed allocation. Traders and portfolio managers across every group draw on the same platform, whether the question is about the last tick or the last year.

The Outcome

The firm has replaced a core-limited, group-by-group architecture with a single enterprise-wide environment that streams intraday data directly to its trading desks. Traders and portfolio managers across all four investment groups now work from continuous real-time data rather than start-of-day snapshots, with on-demand calculation, point-in-time analysis, and warm disaster recovery built in. The platform is engineered to handle more than 12,000 securities across equities and ETFs.

If your team is scaling into new markets or reconciling real-time and historical data across separate systems, see how OneTick Cloud handles it. Explore OneTick Cloud, or book a demo to talk through your setup.