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Financial Services > Capital Markets & Market Infrastructure Practice

Capital Markets & Market Infrastructure Practice

Umbrex connects leading capital markets & market infrastructure firms to independent consultants with deep experience in the industry.

Over 90% of our Capital Markets & Market Infrastructure Practice consultants are alums of McKinsey, Bain, or BCG.

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Client Segments Umbrex Serves

  • Multi-asset exchanges & electronic trading venues: Listed exchanges, derivatives markets, ATS/MTFs/OTFs, and bond/FX platforms; scaling listings/liquidity, market design, data/indices, surveillance, and cross‑border growth.
  • Central counterparties & clearing houses: CCPs clearing cash and derivatives; optimizing margin models, collateral/liquidity, default management, interoperability, capital efficiency, and new‑product clearing.
  • CSDs, ICSDs & post‑trade utilities: Securities depositories and settlement utilities; improving T+1/T+0 readiness, corporate actions, proxy, DLT tokenization pilots, cross‑border links, and risk/compliance.
  • Broker‑dealers, agency brokers & market makers: Sell‑side execution firms and electronic liquidity providers; enhancing client coverage, algo/EMS, SOR, risk, financing/prime, and capital‑efficient market making.
  • Trading technology, connectivity & market infrastructure vendors: Providers of matching engines, OMS/EMS, networks, co‑lo, and regtech; scaling performance, reliability, integrations, client onboarding, and monetization via embedded data and services.

Selected Capabilities of our Capital Markets & Market Infrastructure Practice

Strategy & Corporate Development

  • Enterprise Strategy And Portfolio Value Plan: Define ambition and portfolio roles across cash, derivatives, fixed income, FX, data, index, and technology; allocate capital to lift liquidity, revenue diversity, and TSR.
  • M&A, Partnerships, And Corporate Development: Build buy‑build‑partner roadmap for exchanges, data providers, indices, and fintech; run diligence, valuation, regulatory strategy, and integration; deliver accretive EBITDA, synergy, and market position.
  • Market Structure And New Venue Strategy: Evaluate and launch ATS, MTF, OTF, and SEF models; design incentives and fee structures; forecast liquidity migration and ROI; secure approvals and member adoption.
  • Data, Index, And Technology Commercialization Strategy: Define growth strategy for market data feeds, indices, benchmarks, co‑location, connectivity, and cloud matching engines; optimize channels and partnerships; expand recurring revenue and valuation multiple.
  • Digital Assets And Tokenization Market Strategy: Assess custody, trading, clearing, and settlement models on distributed ledger; map regulatory pathways; prioritize use cases; design go‑to‑market; de‑risk investment and accelerate institutional adoption.

Operations

  • Client Onboarding And Membership Operations: Standardize broker-dealer and participant onboarding, KYC and anti-money laundering (AML) checks, documentation, fee setup, entitlements; reduce time to activate, errors, and compliance risk.
  • Post-Trade Exceptions And Reconciliations Optimization: Redesign exceptions, breaks, cash and position reconciliations, buy-ins and market claims; implement workflow and metrics; increase straight-through processing; reduce settlement fails, write-offs, manual touches.
  • Reference Data And Instrument Master Management: Centralize instrument creation, identifiers, classifications, symbology, and corporate hierarchies; impose data quality rules and stewardship; improve timeliness, accuracy, and downstream reliability.
  • Corporate Actions And Issuer Services Operations Excellence: Standardize announcements, entitlements validation, elections capture, and event dissemination; enhance issuer listing changes and disclosures; cut errors, client impact, and operational risk.
  • Operational Risk And Controls For Market Infrastructure: Build control framework, SOC 1 readiness, Sarbanes‑Oxley (SOX) evidence, reconciliation controls, risk and control self-assessments; reduce incidents, audit findings, and regulatory scrutiny.

Procurement & Strategic Sourcing

  • Market Data And Index Licensing Optimization: Rationalize Bloomberg, Refinitiv, ICE, exchange feeds, and index benchmarks; implement entitlement audits and usage governance; reduce spend, audit risk, and noncompliant redistribution.
  • Core Technology And Infrastructure Sourcing: Run competitive sourcing for matching engines, FIX gateways, colocation, networks, and cloud; negotiate SLAs and latency commitments; lower total cost and improve resilience.
  • Cloud And SaaS Commercial Optimization: Negotiate cloud commit, reserved capacity, egress, data residency, and SaaS metrics; implement FinOps and chargeback; reduce run-rate cost and vendor lock-in.
  • Connectivity And Colocation Vendor Strategy: Source colocation racks, cross-connects, proximity hosting, dark fiber, and microwave; benchmark tariffs and power; cut latency spend and improve uptime and capacity.
  • Third-Party Risk Management And Supplier Governance: Build third-party risk management segmentation, due diligence, and controls aligned to SOC 2 and SEC Regulation SCI; enforce SLAs; reduce outages and regulatory risk.

Product

  • Trading Venue Product Design And Roadmap: Define order types, matching logic, auctions, tick regimes, and close for capital markets venues; validate with participants; improve liquidity quality, fill rates, and market fairness.
  • Market Data Feed Productization: Design depth-of-book and top-of-book feeds for exchanges and market operators, symbology, schemas, entitlements, redistribution terms, delivery protocols; improve latency, reliability, monetization, and client integration effort.
  • Index And Benchmark Development: Build methodologies, eligibility, weighting, rebalancing, and corporate actions policies; implement governance aligned to International Organization of Securities Commissions Principles; enable licensing, dissemination, and institutional adoption.
  • Connectivity And Colocation Product Portfolio: Define port speeds, protocols, cross-connects, proximity hosting, cabinet options, monitoring, and support tiers for low-latency capital markets connectivity; publish clear SLAs; increase performance, reliability, uptake.
  • Client API And Developer Experience: Launch REST, WebSocket, and FIX APIs with versioning, sandbox, sample code, and change governance for trading and data; improve time to integrate, stability, satisfaction.

Organization

  • Enterprise Operating Model And Governance For Market Operators: Design structure, decision rights, roles and responsibilities across trading, clearing, data, technology; define risk, change, and incident committees; improve accountability, speed, resilience, and regulatory confidence.
  • SRO And Regulatory Independence Organization Design: Establish ring‑fenced market regulation, surveillance, and listings oversight with independent reporting lines and charters; meet self‑regulatory organization (SRO) independence expectations; strengthen market integrity and governance.
  • Workforce Planning And 24×7 Coverage Model: Build staffing models for market operations, support, network and security operations centers, and site reliability engineering; enable follow‑the‑sun; improve incident response, uptime, and service levels.
  • Incentives And Performance Management For Exchanges And Central Counterparties: Design scorecards and compensation tied to uptime, latency, liquidity, service quality, controls, and financial targets; align behaviors to reliability, growth, and risk outcomes.
  • Location Strategy And Org Footprint Optimization: Determine headquarters, data center adjacencies, operations hubs, and nearshore sites; set shift patterns and on-call policies; lower cost, strengthen resilience, and meet regulator access expectations.

Pricing

  • Trading Fee And Incentive Model Design: Design maker‑taker vs taker‑maker fee schedules, rebates, tiers, caps, and auction fees by segment and venue; optimize liquidity quality, market share, and net revenue.
  • Clearing And Settlement Fee Optimization: Structure clearing, netting, give‑up, compression, and membership fees; align with margin and risk; drive volume, participant adoption, and predictable earnings.
  • Market Data Pricing And Policy Governance: Set device, non‑display, redistribution, enterprise, and derived data fees with usage policies and audits; expand recurring revenue, reduce leakage, and meet regulatory expectations.
  • Connectivity And Colocation Tariff Strategy: Price ports, message rates, cross‑connects, cabinets, power, and proximity hosting tiers; benchmark elasticity; increase uptake, average revenue per user (ARPU), and cost recovery while protecting service level agreements (SLAs).
  • Index And Benchmark Licensing Commercials: Design licensing for ETFs, derivatives, and asset managers—assets under management (AUM)‑based, per‑product, and redistribution; negotiate term sheets; grow licensing revenue and compliant usage.

Finance

  • CFO FP&A And Performance Steering: Build driver-based models linking volumes, rate cards, data subscriptions, colocation, and costs; deliver segment profitability reporting, rolling forecasts, scenarios; improve operating margin and cash conversion.
  • Revenue Recognition And Quote-To-Cash Modernization: Standardize International Financial Reporting Standard 15 and ASC 606 for market data and connectivity; implement metering, entitlements, billing, collections; reduce revenue leakage and days sales outstanding.
  • Cost Transparency And Unit Economics: Implement activity-based costing and cost-to-serve for venues, matching, surveillance, data, and colocation; enable total cost of ownership (TCO) by product; inform pricing, sourcing, investment decisions.
  • Treasury, Liquidity, And Collateral Management: Optimize cash management, intraday liquidity lines, central bank accounts, and collateral investment policies; strengthen covenant compliance; reduce funding cost, counterparty risk, and operational risk.
  • Capital Structure And Ratings Strategy: Optimize leverage, dividend and buyback policy, legal entity cash flows, and credit ratings posture; lower cost of capital and enable disciplined inorganic and organic growth.

AI, Data & Analytics

  • Real-Time Market Data Lakehouse And Feature Store: Build governed tick and order book lakehouse streaming from Financial Information eXchange (FIX) and multicast feeds; enable backtesting, real-time analytics, and learning feature store.
  • Surveillance AI And Cross-Market Pattern Detection: Develop machine learning and natural language processing models for spoofing, layering, wash trades, and news-driven manipulation; cut false positives, time-to-disposition, and improve regulator defensibility.
  • Liquidity, Microstructure, And Pricing Analytics: Build order-book microstructure analytics for spreads, depth, queue position, toxicity, and auction dynamics; optimize fee schedules, incentive tiers, and product design to grow quality liquidity.
  • Client Usage, Churn, And Revenue Analytics: Instrument data and connectivity usage; model churn propensity, upsell next-best-product, and price realization; reduce revenue leakage and improve annual recurring revenue predictability.
  • Latency Telemetry And Capacity Forecasting Analytics: Analyze tick-to-trade latency, queue times, and throughput using time-series models; detect anomalies, forecast capacity, and prevent service level breaches and incidents.

Transformation

  • Enterprise Transformation Blueprint And Value Office: Define North Star, value case, and initiative portfolio; run a value office tracking uptime, latency, revenue mix, and opex; enforce benefits realization and risk management.
  • Product Operating Model And Agile At Scale: Implement product-centric funding, ownership, and cross-functional pods across trading, data, connectivity, and clearing; install objectives and key results; accelerate delivery velocity, quality, and time-to-market.
  • Structural Cost Takeout And Simplification: Run zero-based redesign, demand management, process standardization, automation scaling, vendor footprint rationalization, and application decommissioning; deliver run-rate savings while protecting resiliency and controls.
  • Front-To-Back Client Journey Digitization: Redesign onboarding, membership, entitlements, connectivity provisioning, and billing; digitize workflows and service; cut cycle time, errors, and cost; accelerate activation and time-to-revenue for participants.
  • Post-Merger Integration And Carve-Out Execution: Stand up integration management office; harmonize platforms, licenses, contracts, and pricing; migrate clients and data; capture cost and revenue synergies without regulatory and service disruption.

Innovation

  • Innovation Operating Model And Funding Governance: Establish mandates, stage gates, funding, IP governance, and KPIs for market operators; move proofs of concept to scale; deliver revenue diversification and resiliency gains.
  • Fintech Scouting And Partnership Pipeline: Source and diligence fintechs for matching, market data, connectivity, risk, and digital assets; run pilots and contracts; de-risk integration, compliance, and ROI for exchanges and CCPs.
  • Digital Assets And Tokenization Pilot Factory: Orchestrate custody, trading, and on-chain settlement pilots on distributed ledger; design rulebooks and compliance pathways; validate liquidity, institutional demand, and unit economics.
  • Market Sandbox And Microstructure Experimentation: Build simulated markets and historical-replay sandboxes; test auctions, tick regimes, and fee incentives; evidence liquidity quality, fairness, and revenue impact before regulatory filings.
  • Venture Building For Data And Connectivity Businesses: Incubate new data feeds, analytics, colocation, and edge connectivity; define pricing, channels, and SLAs; launch scalable recurring revenue adjacencies with rapid participant adoption.

Sustainability

  • Net Zero Strategy And Scope 3 Abatement: Set science-based targets; quantify Scope 1-3; design levers—data center efficiency, renewable PPAs, shifting, travel and procurement; deliver roadmap and governance; cut emissions and energy cost.
  • Sustainable Market Products And Listing Segments: Design green bond and sustainability-linked listings, transition finance segments, ESG derivatives; define eligibility, verification, disclosure, and incentives; attract issuers, investors, and quality liquidity.
  • Carbon Markets And Environmental Instruments Strategy: Define and launch voluntary carbon markets, guarantees of origin, and environmental certificates; set rulebooks, registry integration, integrity safeguards; build trust, liquidity, and recurring revenue.
  • ESG Data Services And Climate Benchmark Commercialization: Develop environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data taxonomies, issuer portals, and climate indices; align to IFRS S1/S2 and EU benchmarks; monetize feeds and improve comparability.
  • Climate Resilience And Infrastructure Adaptation Planning: Assess climate physical risk to data centers and network sites; model heat, flood, wildfire; prioritize CapEx, redundancy, and site strategy; strengthen uptime and regulator confidence.

Compliance

  • Regulatory Compliance Framework And Risk Assessment: Build enterprise compliance risk assessment, policies, control library, and three‑lines governance aligned to SEC, CFTC, ESMA, FCA, IOSCO; reduce findings, strengthen culture, and management reporting.
  • Rulebook Management And SRO Obligations Governance: Design rulebook change lifecycle, interpretations, filings, consultations, and approvals; document regulatory independence and charters; ensure timely compliance with market operator and self‑regulatory organization obligations.
  • Regulatory Reporting And Transparency Compliance: Implement MiFID II/MiFIR, EMIR, SFTR, Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT), TRACE, and CFTC Part 43/45 reporting with data lineage, reconciliations, controls; improve completeness, timeliness, and accuracy.
  • Reg SCI And Operational Resilience Compliance: Implement SEC Regulation Systems Compliance and Integrity (Reg SCI) and DORA controls, testing, evidencing; strengthen governance and notifications; pass exams and reduce outage compliance risk.
  • Books And Records And Recordkeeping Compliance: Design books and records, retention, and surveillance‑adjacent controls for SEC 17a‑4 WORM, MiFID recording, clock sync, and e‑comms; ensure evidencing, retrieval, and audit readiness.

Program & Portfolio Management

  • Enterprise PMO For Market Operators: Establish EPMO with stage gates, investment governance, risk controls, and executive dashboards; govern trading, data, and clearing portfolios; secure milestones, benefits realization, budgets, and audit readiness.
  • Portfolio Prioritization And Funding Governance: Prioritize change by uptime, latency, regulatory deadlines, revenue impact, and client outcomes; align capacity and budgets; sequence platform, data, and connectivity roadmaps for value.
  • Regulatory Change Portfolio Office: Centralize planning and execution for MiFID II/MiFIR, EMIR, Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT), Reg SCI, DORA; coordinate requirements, testing, evidencing; meet deadlines without participant disruption.
  • Release Management And Cutover Orchestration: Coordinate releases across matching engines, gateways, market data, and clearing interfaces; conduct dress rehearsals and rollback plans; minimize incidents, out-of-hours risk, and regulatory notifications.
  • Program Recovery And Vendor Turnaround: Diagnose failing initiatives; reset scope, plan, vendors, contracts, and staffing; install daily management and risk burndowns; recover timelines, budgets, and benefits realization.

Information Technology

  • Trading Platform And Matching Engine Modernization: Modernize matching engines and order gateways for microsecond latency, deterministic jitter, throughput, hot‑warm failover and active‑active; strengthen pre‑trade risk; improve liquidity quality, uptime, scalability.
  • Market Data Distribution And Entitlements Platform: Re‑architect multicast and TCP market data, normalization, gap detection, recovery, and entitlements; reduce latency and jitter; increase reliability, capacity, and compliant redistribution revenue.
  • Low-Latency Network And Time Synchronization Architecture: Design spine‑leaf networks, kernel‑bypass paths, and precision time protocol (PTP) clock sync; engineer deterministic latency budgets; meet MiFID II RTS 25; improve stability and performance.
  • Resilience Engineering And Disaster Recovery For Reg SCI: Implement active‑active patterns, kill‑switches, dark‑site drills, chaos testing, capacity stress, and recovery runbooks; achieve SEC Regulation SCI compliance and DORA resilience; reduce outage impact, notifications.
  • Participant Certification And Conformance Test Environments: Build self‑service certification for FIX, binary, and market data protocols with simulators, regression suites, and attestation; cut onboarding time, defects, and weekend release risk.

Capital Projects

  • Data Center And Colocation Site Selection: Evaluate owned versus colocation, latency, power, cooling, tax, risk, and regulatory fit; select sites and contracts to optimize uptime, cost, and scalability.
  • Capacity Planning And Power Upgrades: Plan compute, rack density, and power growth; design N+1 or 2N redundancy, generators, battery backup, and cooling retrofits; avoid bottlenecks, outages, and stranded CapEx.
  • Build-Out Delivery And Commissioning Governance: Lead design-build procurement, schedule, budgets, change control, factory and site acceptance testing, and Tier certification; deliver compliant, on-time, on-budget facilities with auditable evidence.
  • Migration And Cutover Orchestration For Live Markets: Plan dual-run, swing migrations, network rehoming, and point-of-presence moves; execute dress rehearsals and rollback; minimize downtime, latency variance, and participant disruption.
  • Capital Program Controls And Procurement Excellence: Stand up capital program office, cost estimating, vendor strategy, contracts, change orders, and earned value; reduce overruns, claims, and delays; improve transparency and audit readiness.

Market Operations

  • Market Control Room And Runbook Standardization: Design 24×7 control room roles, shift handoffs, pre‑open/open/intraday/close/overnight checklists, and market status controls; reduce errors, variance, and time‑to‑recover.
  • Halt, Auction, And Circuit Breaker Procedures Optimization: Redesign halt triggers, volatility auctions, limit up/limit down workflows, intermarket coordination, and regulator notifications; improve fairness, price discovery, and time‑to‑resume.
  • Incident Command And Postmortem Excellence: Implement incident command system, severity definitions, bridges, stakeholder scripts, and blameless postmortems with corrective actions; cut mean time to detect, resolve, and recurrence.
  • Participant Communications And Market Notices Management: Standardize market notices, real‑time alerts, readiness bulletins, and change calendars; enhance entitlement lists and channels; improve clarity, response times, and regulator confidence.
  • Operational Telemetry And Service Level Governance: Deploy dashboards for uptime, latency, message rates, rejections, auctions, and alerts; define SLAs and thresholds; enable proactive intervention and evidencing for Reg SCI and DORA.

Clearing & Settlement

  • Clearing Risk Model Design And PFMI Alignment: Design and validate initial margin, variation margin, default fund sizing, backtesting, and anti‑procyclicality; align to Principles for Financial Market Infrastructures; strengthen coverage and regulatory confidence.
  • Default Management And Auction Readiness: Build central counterparty (CCP) default management playbooks for hedging, auction design, porting, liquidation, and liquidity lines; run fire‑drills; cut time‑to‑auction, loss given default, and risk.
  • Settlement Cycle Acceleration And CSDR Settlement Discipline: Redesign matching, allocation, affirmation, and settlement instruction with central securities depositories for T+1/T+0; implement penalties and buy‑in controls; reduce fails, capital, and operational risk.
  • Collateral And Margin Efficiency Optimization: Optimize eligible collateral schedules, haircuts, concentration limits, cross‑margining, and intraday calls; deploy tri‑party and optimization tools; lower margin drag, funding cost, and liquidity risk.
  • Compression And Netting Strategy: Design bilateral and multilateral compression, novation, and settlement netting programs; coordinate rulebook, technology, and participant incentives; shrink gross notional, obligations, capital, and operational load.

Market Surveillance

  • Surveillance Operating Model And Governance: Design operating model, roles, escalation, SLAs, QA, and metrics for trading surveillance; strengthen independence, consistency, audit trail, and regulator confidence.
  • Alert Inventory Rationalization And Scenario Tuning: Rationalize scenarios and calibrate thresholds for spoofing, layering, wash trading, momentum ignition, insider trading; reduce false positives, time-to-disposition, and backlog while maintaining detection coverage.
  • Surveillance Technology Strategy And Implementation: Select and implement trade surveillance platforms and case managers; integrate order, trade, market data, and analytics; improve detection accuracy, workflow efficiency, and regulator-credible evidencing.
  • Trade And Communications Reconstruction Readiness: Build trade and e‑communications reconstruction linking orders, executions, voice, chat, and email with synchronized timestamps; accelerate investigations, MAR and SEC responses, and enforcement defensibility.
  • Surveillance Model Governance And Effectiveness Testing: Establish model inventory, validation, backtesting, drift monitoring, and periodic effectiveness reviews; document rationales and thresholds; meet ESMA MAR expectations and internal model risk standards.

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Umbrex rapidly connects you with independent professionals who combine top‑tier consulting experience at firms such as McKinsey, Bain, Boston Consulting Group with hands‑on roles.

Find a consultant in our Capital Markets & Market Infrastructure Practice

Prefer email? Write to [email protected]

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