FIA Futures and Options Expo 2016, held in Chicago on October 18-20, included 30 sessions and featured 130 speakers. The event focused on providing insight and ideas on issues important to the futures, options and cleared swaps community.

IPC conducted a survey of 239 attendees at the FIA Futures and Options Expo (October 19 and 20, 2016) and found for the second year in a row that participants plan to increase their spend on technology.

What we found is that in the coming year, firms believe they will face challenges, namely, entering new geographies, compliance, uncovering new sources of liquidity, and trading new asset classes. Firms will need to turn to opportunistic and alternative sources of liquidity and tap into new geographies and asset classes.Having access to a diverse financial ecosystem which enables access to liquidity venues, trade lifecycle services, market data, and other counterparties will be critical in tackling these issues.

*Our goals included gathering information on: business drivers for projected technology spend, challenges for 2017, and usage/intended usage of hosted and cloud-based services.