Clear Street announced that it’s expanded asset class coverage to include fixed income securities after six months of development. The expansion taps into the prime broker’s “single-source-of-truth” platform, which uses cloud-native, event-driven, and horizontally scalable technology, and consists of hundreds of microservices that can communicate via a library of APIs (application programming interfaces).
“Launching support for fixed income in just six months required coordination across various business and technology teams. Nearly every engineering group – reference data, clearing and settlement, custody, risk, and securities finance – needed to add new capabilities while working in parallel,” Clear Street wrote in a statement.
For example, the risk engineering team was building models for convertible bond risk even before the reference data team finalized their data inputs for such bonds. This is possible because of the API-first approach.
“We don’t need to wait for teams to finalize their work and provide concrete implementations for all APIs to begin developing dependent components. We were confident that if we created durable API contracts, all the pieces would click into place, like a giant jigsaw puzzle,” Clear Street wrote in a statement. “The microservices-based architecture also helped us roll out a change of this magnitude. In the last month alone, we deployed well over 100 production releases to prepare for the launch.”