AWS for Industries

Cloud Adoption Update for Financial Market Infrastructure Providers 1H25

Introduction

Financial Market Infrastructure Providers (FMIs) continue to accelerate the migration of critical workloads across the trade lifecycle to AWS. During the first half of 2025, Exchanges, Central Counterparty Clearing Houses (CCPs), and Central Security Depositories (CSDs) continue to use cloud services. These services include AI and GenAI capabilities, as engines of innovation and differentiation for their businesses. This has led FMIs to lean in with AWS and structure long-term strategic partnerships.

In the first six months of 2025, AWS announced several technical innovations important to the FMI community. AWS announced the general availability of the second generation accelerated networking Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances on AWS Outposts. These include Bmn-sf2e and bmn-cx2 instances for ultra-low latency and deterministic performance workloads, such as low latency data consumption, exchange matching engines and trading platforms. AWS expanded its local zone footprint by opening an additional AWS Local Zone in New York City, supporting latency sensitive workloads at the edge. AWS continues to build out its low-earth orbit satellite network, Project Kuiper, which launched its first 27 satellites into space in April and has a busy launch schedule for the rest of the year. To meet customers’ fine-grained time keeping requirements, AWS Time Sync Service now supports nanosecond-precision hardware packet timestamping, further leveraging the PTP Hardware Clocks in the AWS Nitro System.

To further accelerate AI adoption, AWS reduced the price of NVIDIA GPUs by up to 45%, for On-Demand and Savings Plan usage of EC2 instances (P4d, P4de, P5, and P5en), and are making the new P6-B200 instances available through Savings Plans to support large-scale deployments. AWS will invest $30 billion to build new AI infrastructure in Pennsylvania and North Carolina to expand cloud computing infrastructure and advance AI innovation.

Strategic Partnerships

FMIs continue to view AWS as a critical partner for the future of their businesses. In the first half of 2025, Nasdaq and the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) each separately announced a strategic partnership and a multi-year collaboration with AWS. Building on more than 15-years of deep collaboration, Nasdaq and AWS announced the next phase of our strategic partnership, with a focus on unlocking a new era of growth for global capital markets. Nasdaq and AWS have combined our joint expertise to create a modernization blueprint for FMIs, designed to empower market operators to more rapidly transform their businesses. The partnership will also see Nasdaq incorporate a managed infrastructure model within its Nordic markets. Powered by AWS infrastructure, it will enable market participants to rapidly scale their GPU usage within Nasdaq’s own data center in Väsby, Sweden. As part of the blueprint, Nasdaq launched the fourth generation of its marketplace technology platform, Nasdaq Eqlipse, the result of years of strategic investment to develop a unified and interoperable suite of solutions across trading, clearing, central securities depository (CSD), and data intelligence. This announcement also included expanded modernization partnerships with the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) and Mexico’s Grupo BMV.

LSEG announced a multi-year collaboration with AWS, naming AWS as the preferred cloud provider for its Markets, Risk Intelligence and FTSE Russell divisions. LSEG announced that they will leverage Amazon Bedrock to give LSEG’s Risk Intelligence division the ability to provide faster, more accurate risk analysis, and empower its customers to stay agile and enhance their resiliency. LSEG will also use AWS to give customers access to historical, quantitative FTSE Russell indices. This allows customers to uncover deeper market trends and patterns, whilst reducing time-to-insight and operational costs. LSEG Markets will also use AWS Outposts to deliver resilient and scalable services to customers. Following the April collaboration announcement, London Clearing House (LCH Ltd), a global clearing house within LSEG Markets, has already migrated its core Collateral Management Service to AWS. The Collateral Management Service supports the investment of LCH Ltd’s portfolio, ensuring resilient management of clearing members’ margin payments.

Trading

Market operators continue to modernize their markets and enhance the performance and resiliency of their trading operations with AWS. TMX launched a new alternative trading system (ATS), AlphaX US, in the US, leveraging AWS’s network-accelerated second generation bmn-sf2e Outposts. Aquis detailed how it migrated its matching engine to AWS to become the first Registered Equity Investment exchange to run in the cloud. In addition to detailing key technical considerations and decisions, Aquis shared how they engaged the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) to ensure hosting their market in AWS complied with regulatory requirements. As one of the first exchanges globally to migrate a fully regulated exchange to the cloud, there was no “regulatory blueprint.” The Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) published a case study sharing how they partnered with Noventiq to build a contingency trading platform on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The platform complies with the Investor Risk Reduction Access (IRRA) guidelines and operates across multiple exchanges in India.

Post-Trade

FMIs continue to migrate core post trade and surrounding systems to the cloud. DTCC received a Notice of No Objection from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to host its core clearance, settlement and risk applications, including its RegSCI systems, on the cloud. The firm will run these applications within public cloud regions, without utilizing hybrid infrastructure. DTCC is moving to the cloud to modernize its infrastructure, improve resiliency, security, and scalability, and position itself to better manage risks and support the evolving needs of the U.S. financial markets. DTCC’s announcement follows the OCC, who also submitted and then received a Notice of No Objection from the SEC to host their core clearing, settlement and risk applications in AWS in November, 2022. CSD BR published a blog post detailing how it migrated its Trade Repository to AWS and became the first Brazilian financial institution to run a highly regulated workload in the cloud. With AWS, CSD BR maintained 100% uptime, scaled its operations dynamically to meet market volatility, and increased innovation and cut costs by 15%. Blox Markets announced they are using AWS for their dev/test and QA environments for Openpool, which is the new retail-focused U.S. equities trading venue that Blox will be launching. They also shared their intent to scale their usage of AWS for more workloads as they continue to build out their market and get closer to launch.

Data, AI, ML & GenAI

Data, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), especially GenAI, have become the most important focal area in the industry and for FMIs. The JPX detailed how it is using Amazon Bedrock to enhance the searchability and usability of the “timely disclosure” documents that listed firms publish in high volumes. JPX serves over 140,000 documents and 1.1 million pages per year. JPX is using GenAI to generate data tags on the documents so that investors can more quickly and easily search for and find the content they need. BSE used AWS to launch a new generative AI tool to help streamline the IPO process for small and medium enterprises. Previously, reviewing and vetting pre-IPO submissions could take several days or weeks. Using GenAI reduced this process to 30-40 minutes, accelerating the IPO listing process and minimizing the amount of manual effort. LSEG announced they used Amazon Q Business to build a Gen-AI powered intelligent assistant to streamline responses and improve efficiency in answering customer queries on London Clearing House policies and requirements while also reducing the risk of miscommunication. The intelligent assistant has saved LSEG’s client services team’s time in generating answers, while providing in-text citations, and enabled them to more quickly and easily answer customer queries. Factset published a blog post discussing how they started migrating their global ticker plant to AWS and shared how AWS was a game changer for enabling them to expand their global footprint, while enhancing scalability and efficiency. Today, Factset runs over 7,000 (and still growing) Amazon EC2 instances supporting everything from feed handling for TCP feeds, to ticker plants, to tick collection and distribution in AWS.

For more information, reach out to Alex Mirarchi and the Capital Markets Market Development team at aws-capital-markets-specialists@amazon.com.

Previous Installments of the FMI Cloud Adoption Blog

New Whitepapers, Blogs and Webinars

Select Public References

Trading Systems in the Cloud (Markets)

Post-Trade Systems: Core settlement and clearing

Post-Trade Systems: Surround Systems (Surveillance, risk, billing & reporting, client billing, analytics)

Data Analytics

Data Distribution (Historical/ Non-Real Time, Real Time, Multicast)

HPC, AI&ML, GenAI

Alex Mirarchi

Alex Mirarchi

Alex Mirarchi is a Principal Capital Markets Industry Specialist at Amazon Web Services (AWS). Alex’s core focus is helping Global Exchanges and Financial Market Infrastructure (FMI) firms transform their businesses with AWS. He leads AWS’s business development for FMIs, trading and connectivity in the cloud and also supports asset managers, investment banks, broker dealers, and fintechs in developing their cloud strategies. Alex joined AWS from Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), where he was responsible for strategy and structuring programs and strategic partnerships with Independent Software Vendors (ISVs). Prior to Oracle, Alex worked in capital markets, selling Asian Equities to Hedge Funds in London with HSBC and in New York with Macquarie Group. Alex also held front office roles in Fixed Income and Foreign Exchange and started his career in HSBC Global Asset Management’s alternative investments division in London. Alex holds an MBA from Columbia Business School and is based in New York.