Tales from Cloud City

Despite the somewhat hazardous levels of pollution coating the city at the moment, it promises to be a good event. This is the first time that Sell-Side Technology has held a trading architecture summit in the region, following on from our highly popular analogues in New York and London, and there are a couple of highlights in the programme.

I'll be moderating the first two panels on electronic trading and innovation in the capital markets technology space, featuring a raft of excellent end-user speakers from institutions such as RBS, Deutsche and Citi.

After that, we have an infrastructure panel and the all-important lunch break, followed by a presentation from Standard Chartered, and discussions around areas such as high-frequency trading (HFT) and big data.

Cloud City
For those of you brave enough to battle through the smog, I'll be there all day, so please do say hello. In a wider sense, though, Asia is obviously a region of increasing importance to the financial services industry. While America and Europe press forward with their significant reforms, the Asia-Pacific landscape remains highly fragmented, from the tightly regimented Japanese market through to the developing Australian and the gateway region of Hong Kong, it's an exciting part of the world.

HFT and its presence is the topic on everyone's lips, of course, but Asia-Pacific has a number of opportunities to learn from the mis-steps of firms in the UK and US in terms of its technology build out. One of the most frequent complaints I hear from technologists is the battle against legacy systems and the need to squeeze very second of life out of them possible, even when they aren't necessarily a perfect fit for the task they're employed in. Asian businesses, as the markets develop, have a chance to learn from the painful lessons associated with infrastructure build out in the West, avoid the pitfalls, and take into account areas such as cloud, big data and other areas in their architecture from the start, potentially yielding huge benefits in the future.

As I said, exciting times. For those of you heading to The Regent on Thursday, I'll see you there.