Baker Technology Simplifies Development for Global Investment Banks & Exchanges with Diffusion®
Baker Technology, a specialist software engineering firm, builds bespoke trading applications for global investment banks and
exchanges. They used Diffusion as a single, secure, solution for consuming, enriching, and delivering trading event data
to their Internet trading platforms built in HTML5. Diffusion eliminates the development time to write the network stack event data
consumption, transformation and delivery Baker’s front-end Internet trading platforms.
Reduced Dev Cycle
Accelerated time to market for trading applications from months to weeks.
80%+ Performance Increase
Optimized event data ingestion, enrichment and delivery for low‑latency trading.
3x Faster
Delivered 3x faster trading app delivery to global customers.
The Challenge
Since the firm’s founding in 1997, Baker Technology has specialized in building bespoke trading systems. Baker Technology’s reputation is based upon deep knowledge of the trading business and efficient delivery of real-time front-end systems. With clients demanding platforms that are ever more technically challenging to build, the company must minimize project complexity and maximize development efficiency to provide competitive advantages to their clients. In a nutshell, the challenges were; access to real-time data feeds over the Internet into HTML5 clients, Reducing project technical delivery risk, Increasing speed of development, and real-time event-data management.
The Requirements
BakerTechnology first encountered Diffusion in 2011 when working with a large international investment bank. Baker Technology was engaged to build the front- end of a large, Internet-facing, FX trading platform. Since then, the company has successfully delivered a wide range of projects for other organizations. Baker’s core business includes:
• Single-dealer platforms
• Internal sales platforms
• Exchange trading platforms
• Real-time business intelligence platforms
These platforms span a wide range of financial products including FX Cash, Money Markets, FX Options, Bonds, and Repos. Across these platforms, Baker Technology has identified some common themes:
• The need to access and manage data from multiple services and third-party systems
- The need to provide event-data distribution over the “last mile” to users on the Internet
- Projects have high levels of technical complexity
- Challenges around testing the user interface with high volumes of real-time data
- Aggressive time to market required by the clients
The Solution and Results
Efficient, high-performance, and highly scalable data management and distribution is a key component of Baker Technology’s bespoke trading systems development projects. Diffusion provides a secure, unified method of distributing and synchronizing data models between the server and the client tier. By using Diffusion as an edge tier, the Baker Technology development teams are relieved of the time and effort they would otherwise have to invest in programming to; consume data from the disparate back-end sources, enrich and transform the data in-flight, and distribute the data to their bespoke front-end applications.
A key part of any development project is thorough testing. With Diffusion, Baker can easily stub out the back-end and use a simulator to connect to the Diffusion API to run their rigorous functional and performance test cases – automatically as part of the build pipeline. The ease of testing with Diffusion, allows the company to build higher quality systems with more predictable performance and failure/recovery profiles.
An important ongoing benefit Diffusion is that teams start with a known platform for handling the data distribution. This reduces delivery times for new applications by allowing developers to concentrate on business deliverables rather than low level technical infrastructure.
Following the 2011 project for the large international investment bank customer, Baker Technology has been engaged to rebuild the bank’s FX trading system twice, as business needs have evolved. They rebuilt the application in HTML5 in 2014 with a complete UX refresh in 2016. David Bull, a Director at Baker Technology, says, “With Diffusion in place as an event-data consumption, enrichment and distribution layer, we were able to completely re-platform the user interface without changing the services on the back end. The bank was able to deliver a new experience to their clients, while leveraging the existing investment in their core services.”
About DiffusionData
DiffusionData’s flagship offering Diffusion® is a secure, real-time Pub/Sub server built for mobile, web, and AI applications. Its patented delta-compression reduces bandwidth by up to 90%, enabling scalable data streaming with minimal latency. Used across financial services, gaming, and transport for mission-critical applications where personalisation and speed matter.