Vela Trading Continues Growth Strategy with Object Trading Acquisition

Last year Vela rebranded itself to move beyond being a market-data specialist—a reputation that was built on SR Labs’ offering and the addition of the Wombat team, which SR Labs bought from the Intercontinental Exchange Group in 2013—toward more of an end-to-end trading platform provider.

To help speed up that evolution, last month it announced the acquisition of OptionsCity, a Chicago-based vendor specializing in futures and options trading and analytics. Jennifer Nayar, CEO of Vela, tells WatersTechnology that Object Trading will help to round out its coverage after the OptionsCity purchase.

“The thought behind these two acquisitions was to start to connect the dots around building out a trading ecosystem, both to run as software but a lot of the demand being to be run as a platform-as-a-service,” she says. The combination of OptionsCity and now Object Trading really starts to complete our buildout to become a more full-service provider.”

The addition of Object Trading will help Vela to expand it’s offering as it will open up new asset classes and geographies to the vendor. Object Trading covers multiple asset classes, but in the near term, Nayar expects Vela to focus on incorporating Object’s fixed income and foreign exchange data and coverage.

“They’ll be the two areas [of focus in the beginning]. Everything else is fairly well sewn up,” she says.

Additionally, Object Trading has spent the last two years expanding into the Asian marketplace. While Vela has offices in the Philippines and India, this acquisition will better help service clients in the region. “We’re seeing increased demand for services in Asia and increased demand to carry Asia content,” Nayar says, adding that they’ll be able to disclose more on those plans after the deal closes, which is expected to happen early in the third quarter of 2017. Object Trading has offices in London, New York, Chicago and Sydney.

As for new product offerings, these two acquisitions should help to provide greater end-to-end functionality. For example, through these deals Vela has added—as mentioned—multi-asset class coverage, including greater market access and market data. It has also added pre-trade risk controls, drop-copy functionality, post-trade processing, analytics, as well as a front-end user interface from OptionsCity for price discovery, workflow management, and order entry.

“There’s not a lot of overlap and that’s what’s really exciting,” she says. “These are all net-new products that we can fully integrate and offer as a full service.”