ADSS strengthens customer trust with real-time analytics from KX

“Clients judge us on whether our interests are aligned with theirs. If pricing is fair, execution is consistent, and the trading experience holds up in all market conditions, then confidence follows naturally.” – Chris Dale, Head of Quantitative Trading, ADSS

ADSS opened its doors in 2010 with a clear focus: trust, transparency and client success. The UAE-headquartered global financial services leader offers a vast range of financial instruments, including commodities, equities, and FX, to a diverse client base across the Middle East and beyond.

Serving a primarily retail client base, ADSS puts trust at the center of its mission. In a crowded and competitive industry where margins are constantly under pressure, transparency is not always guaranteed, ADSS prioritizes long-term client relationships over short-term gains. At the heart of this approach is an unwavering commitment to innovation, always balanced with rigorous security and compliance standards. This philosophy has led ADSS to work with leading technology providers, including KX, to ensure it continues to deliver fair, reliable and forward-looking trading experiences.

Data is the foundation of trust

“Market conditions change in seconds. Our job is to keep execution stable, and pricing fair. Real-time visibility helps us do that and maintain our clients’ confidence in the platform.” – Nikos Tsoskounoglou, Head of Quantitative Research, ADSS

Delivering the highest quality products and best possible client experience demands that ADSS stays at the forefront of analytics-powered innovation. To ingest, process and analyze billions of ticks per day with minimal latency, ADSS works with partners that have an unrivaled big data pedigree.

Since 2018, ADSS has relied on KX to underpin its robust approach to customer value, risk management, and continuous improvement. Leveraging our technology to support advanced real-time analytics allows the brokerage to drive superior execution, identify market patterns and mitigate risk with a high degree of agility.

With the ability to interrogate large volumes of streaming data for real-time insights, ADSS can maintain a strong level of pricing confidence and understand its risk exposure in real time, supporting ongoing management or mitigation. In addition, robust backtesting on high-quality historical data enables ADSS to continuously review and optimize trading performance.

This advanced analytics capability also ensures that ADSS can provide detailed, data-led feedback to its liquidity providers. This data is in great demand from tier-one banks and brokerages, enabling ADSS to forge stronger, trusted industry partnerships that ultimately support better execution for its customers.

Making an impact with data: Three game-changing use cases

Confident pricing and real-time liquidity

“When market conditions deteriorate, KX’s real-time analytics help us stay on top of circumstances as they unfold, so that we can confidently maintain a robust execution environment for our clients.” – Chris Dale, Head of Quantitative Trading, ADSS

With markets operating in microseconds, ADSS leverages vast streams of market data for an up-to-date view of trading conditions that drive confident pricing and best-in-class execution. By building on the ultra-fast kdb+ database, the firm can process and analyze market data for insights in real time, enabling it to show prices with confidence and deliver tighter spreads for clients.

Advanced analytics and machine learning tools also empower the brokerage’s quantitative teams to model likely price action with greater accuracy. These predictive capabilities mean ADSS can continue to provide prices even when liquidity dries up, for example, if market makers momentarily pull prices ahead of a major Fed interest rate decision.

Agile risk management

“Being able to understand and respond to market shifts in real time is critical. KX helps us maintain tight spreads and consistent pricing even when conditions change quickly.” – Nikos Tsoskounoglou, Head of Quantitative Research, ADSS

Our high-performance analytics also enable quant teams at ADSS to comprehensively mitigate market risk. With visibility into its level of exposure within one or two milliseconds of a trade, ADSS can systematically manage risk in real time.

By understanding and adjusting positions instantly, and displaying key information to its trading desks, ADSS can confidently offer great pricing and best-in-class execution to customers and by detecting anomalies and reacting rapidly, the brokerage can mitigate dangers like sudden market volatility or illiquidity.

Robust backtesting and continuous improvement

“We regularly run backtests across our historical trading data. It helps us understand outcomes and refine our approach and is a continuous learning loop for our team.” – Chris Dale, Head of Quantitative Trading, ADSS

Every three months, ADSS runs comprehensive backtests of “what-if” scenarios covering their historic trades from the previous quarter and across the past three years. This regular review surfaces learnings that drive innovation, targeted improvements, and refinements to pricing strategies.

With kdb+ providing a strong technology backbone for its high-performance analytics, ADSS can store, normalize and rapidly retrieve vast historical data to power this robust backtesting. Analyzing multiple years of market microstructures requires processing enormous volumes of data—making the ultra-fast retrieval a critical enabler of kdb+.

Democratizing data access with PyKX

“PyKX lets traders explore data directly instead of relying on quants to run everything. It speeds up research and accelerates learning and decision-making.” – Nikos Tsoskounoglou, Head of Quantitative Research, ADSS

ADSS has also been able to accelerate the development of analytics thanks to PyKX.

While kdb+ has its own fast and expressive programming language called ‘q’, Python is far more commonly used. PyKX enables interoperability between the two languages, allowing Python users to access the power of kdb+.

In practice, PyKX has made data more accessible across ADSS, allowing a broader team of analysts to examine data to spot trends and identify insights. This has greatly increased the cadence of research and analysis, meaning new techniques and strategies reach the market faster.

ADSS sees safety in numbers as it accelerates into the future

“KX underpins a lot of what we do. Clients don’t see the technology, but they feel it through stable pricing, execution quality, and a reliable trading experience. – Chris Dale, Head of Quantitative Trading, ADSS

As the financial sector continues to adapt and evolve, one lesson from the past is clear: innovate or fall behind. For ADSS, that means a continuous commitment to harnessing data to stay ahead of industry trends, shape the future of trading, and empower customers to succeed.

Driving this strategy is a focus on advanced technology, paired with the human trust that underpins every client relationship. As new tools emerge, ADSS will continue to embrace innovation while ensuring transparency, integrity and customer value remain at the core.

See how KX helps leading financial institutions deliver confident pricing, resilient execution, and real-time risk management at scale. Book a demo or head to our Why KX page.