CEOs don’t have it easy – just ask Viral Tolat. The CEO of TradAir, a trading technology solutions provider, spent just four days at home last month.
Half a year into his role, Tolat has been jetting between TradAir’s Singapore, London, Tel Aviv and New York offices. All of this to ensure he can provide the firm with the boost he was brought in to give.
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Last week, amidst a busy schedule, Finance Magnates managed to catch up with Tolat at his firm’s Tel Aviv office. Over the course of our half-hour conversation, we discussed his first few months at TradAir, plans for growth and the cryptocurrency craze.
Acclimatising
“We didn’t announce my appointment immediately.” Said Tolat as we started our discussion, “If we’d made it public, I would have been barraged with requests for interviews and so on. For those first few months, I just wanted to understand the company, the people, the clients and the processes so that we can take it to the next level.”
That “next level” is the reason Tolat was hired. TradAir has been performing well over the past few years but it appears the company’s shareholders believe growth can be accelerated.
“The investors brought me in as they thought that there was an opportunity to grow this company.” Tolat told Finance Magnates, “With our products, I think that’s certain to happen if we do things the right way.”
For those who aren’t familiar with the firm, TradAir provides a range of trading technologies including a rate engine, distribution technology and trading analytics solutions. It’s best known product, however, is it’s white label trading platform.
“Our clients want their own brand”
“We lead with our front-end user experience,” said Tolat, “A lot of other white labels, you just stick your company logo on it but you can see it’s the same thing. We are more flexible with our configurability. Two customers may be using our technology but you wouldn’t be able to tell that it’s the same product. In the institutional space, that’s really important. Our clients want their own brand, they don’t want what everyone else has.”
That’s all well and good but how accessible is the product? Trading, after all, can be a high-speed game, requiring connections to specific data centres and access to decent hardware.
“If you’re a high-frequency trader and 10 microseconds makes a difference to you, we offer a fully hosted solution.” Said Tolat, “For our less latency sensitive customers who want a great end-user system, we offer a cloud-based solution that can be deployed quickly pretty much anywhere in the world.
Ease of access isn’t the only perk that comes with TradAir’s white label. The speed with which its technology can be put into action was on display recently too. At the beginning of July, the firm announced it had formed a partnership with BlockFill – a cryptocurrency broker for institutional clients.
