White papers

Financial markets have long relied on technology to be fast, resilient, and trustworthy – for compliance purposes, but also due to a shared understanding of the systemic impact of financial instability in interconnected infrastructure. Matching engines, market data, and clearing and settlement systems undergo rigorous testing because livelihoods, economies, and market integrity depend on them. With AI-enabled systems becoming embedded in enterprise-level tasks – across sectors, but in finance in particular – the safety guardrails should be as strong as ever, if not stronger.

As technological and regulatory innovation accelerates in financial services, software testing firms have a unique opportunity to move from compliance-driven assurance to showcasing their expertise at the heart of digital experimentation. In the white paper 'Test, collaborate, lead: turning industry engagement into a strategic advantage', Exactpro’s Alyona Bulda explores how participation in initiatives such as PoCs, hackathons and calls for public consultation offers a high-return investment in visibility, capability and market relevance. While weighing the strategic pros and cons, Alyona outlines why software testing and other IT companies should leverage these opportunities.

In the May edition of World Federation of Exchanges Focus, Iosif Itkin, CEO & Co-Founder of Exactpro, explores the current state of AI adoption in financial organisations, highlighting the challenges of implementing AI in regulated environments. From the Productivity Paradox and regulatory aspects to skills shortages, AI literacy, and robust testing strategies, the article outlines a comprehensive framework and a foundation for preparing people, platforms, processes, and security for safe and effective AI integration across the financial sector.

In the April issue of the World Federation of Exchanges Focus magazine, Exactpro’s Alyona Bulda analyses why now is the moment to coordinate the efforts to ensure the quality and reliability of market data solution integrations. Highlighting the complexity of market data systems and the surrounding infrastructure, Alyona presents industry-tested best practices able to embed quality into market data, ticker plant, consolidated tape, SIPs and direct-feed solutions that handle market data from multiple trading venues.

A 100%-scale tends to be a common sign of “complete” test coverage, or the degree of test automation, in assessing the quality of complex financial technology platforms. But is it always clear what the “100%” implies and what requirements it actually satisfies? In this article, I aim to examine why this approach is fundamentally at odds with what comprehensive quality assessment is, and why it does not lead to representative test coverage.

As a number of countries have successfully transitioned to the compressed settlement standard, many are still to follow suit. In the meantime, market infrastructure operators on both sides of the transformation are impacted by occasional incongruent workflows, mostly resulting from the discrepancies between post trade and the related processes, such as FX management or securities lending – taking place across several time zones. It is curious to see what adjustments are happening on the side of the technology teams tasked with validating the quality of new post-trade platform setups. Does the impact compare in significance to the changes that clearing and settlement organisations have made or are about to undergo?