About Caplin
About Caplin Systems
What does Caplin do?
Caplin Systems provides investment banks, online brokers and other financial firms with software and professional services that enable them to build high-performance low-latency applications that deliver real-time data and trading to their clients over the Internet. These e-commerce applications run in a standard Web browser.
In the investment banking and broker/dealer space, the Web application that delivers analysis, news, pre-trade data, pricing and trading to a firms clients is known, together with its supporting infrastructure, as a single-dealer platform.
A single-dealer platform is a software infrastructure that distributes a bank's internal pricing, trading, permissioning and pre-trade information for one or more asset classes directly to the bank's clients in real time over the Internet. It also includes the client-facing application(s) which historically were locally installed, but today are typically browser-based and built using native Web technologies so they can run on any computer, smartphone, tablet or other device without add-ins and irrespective of operating system.
Caplin's products
Caplin Xaqua is a server-side framework for building multi-product Web trading applications.
Caplin Trader is an HTML5-ready Web framework that enables Caplin's clients to quickly implement a fully-featured trading workstation, independent of device or operating system, on the Web.
These products are not "out of the box" solutions - each firm wants to make its e-commerce offering unique, and each has its own systems, interfaces and workflows. Caplin's products get a firm most of the way to implementing a Web trading application, while allowing it to quickly and cost-effectively extend, modify and enhance it to meet the firm's own particular technology, business and market requirements.
Caplin's technology is used by three of the top five FX e-trading banks*.
Caplin's services
Caplin provides project management, implementation and development services to enable its customers to implement Web trading applications with Caplin's products. An engagement can vary from providing initial consultancy and training to enable a firm's team or chosen implementer to build its Web trading application, through to taking on entire responsibility for the project delivery.
Typically the firms's own team manages the implementation of the interface between Caplin Xaqua and the firm's own internal systems, and Caplin's professional services team manage the implementation of the front-end user workflow and interface.
A project to build a Web trading application for a single asset class typically takes 3-9 months, depending on the complexity of the project and the size of the team.
The company
Founded in 2000, Caplin Systems is incorporated in England and Wales and is based in the City of London with a sales office in New York. The company is privately held and the majority of its staff are employed in product development and professional services. In the financial year to March 31st 2011, Caplin's revenues grew by 53% year-on-year, and at the end of the half-year to September 30th 2011 Caplin's revenues were 88% up on the same period the previous year.
*Top five FX e-trading banks according to Euromoney FX Poll 2011.