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Caplin launches end-to-end white-label digital asset solution for institutional trading desks

Gives sell-side firms hosted multi-asset trading infrastructure out of the box with deployment in as little as 12 weeks.

How we build better UX in trading: inside the design day practice

In capital markets, user experience (UX) isn’t just a design concern, it’s a performance lever. The stakes are high: users work fast, systems are complex and the risk of error is always present. Yet too often, UX becomes an afterthought, squeezed into the end of a sprint or retrofitted after delivery.

Caplin welcomes James Scott as new Head of Operations

We are pleased to announce the appointment of James Scott as our new Head of Operations. In his new role, James will focus on optimising Caplin’s end-to-end delivery efficiency and quality, ensuring the company can scale its growth while maintaining the highest standards for our clients. His leadership will be instrumental in strengthening Caplin’s operational foundations as the company continues to expand its global footprint.

Rethinking FX sales: Unlocking margin and client value through modern FX sales technology

Delivering a superior client experience is no longer a differentiator - it is a prerequisite. For banks seeking to serve and attract trading clients, it is especially critical. With unprecedented access to real-time pricing data and an expanding universe of FX liquidity providers, clients now demand speed, transparency, and responsiveness from their sales coverage.

Hackday XIX: Ship Happens! Winning Project - Git Luigi

Every year at Caplin Systems, there’s a day (two days, technically) when the usual rhythm of tickets, releases, and sprints is paused. Instead, engineers, designers, product managers, and anyone else who wants to join, participate in one of the company’s most anticipated traditions: Hackday.

From Legacy to Leveraged: Re-imagining the FX Trading Sales Desk

Tom Darvall, Managing Director at Caplin Systems, sits down with Toby Babb to discuss how trading technology is advancing, sales desks are evolving, and user experience is becoming a critical part of capital markets infrastructure.

ConFig 2025 - Caplin's product team attend Figma's first European conference

Last week, members of our Product & Design team attended Config London 2025, Figma’s flagship design conference, hosted for the first time in Europe at the capital’s ExCel Centre. The day was packed with keynotes and talks from some of the most influential voices in the design world.

Embracing the digital age: Regional banks and Single Dealer Platforms

In an industry where typically, “the big get bigger”, regional banks are facing growing competitive threat and business performance pressure. While global banks continue to represent the predominant share of foreign exchange and wider capital markets activity “share of wallet”, many regional banks are looking to differentiate their client offering in a highly competitive space through specialised service innovation, and particularly, by embracing ‘next gen’ digital Single Dealer Platform technology.

Caplin Shortlisted for Two TradingTech Insight Awards - USA 2025

The evolution and future of single-dealer platforms

Single Dealer Platforms (SDPs) are seeing a resurgence in use and sophistication. They have become an essential tool in the FX market, offering a direct and efficient gateway for trading. Over the past decade, these platforms have undergone significant transformation to meet the growing demands of banks and particularly those with diverse client groups. This article explores how and why SDPs have evolved, their value proposition, deployment strategies, integration of next-generation technologies, maturity levels, and future trends.

Tom Darvall appointed Managing Director in next phase of company growth

We are pleased to announce that Tom Darvall has been appointed to the new role of Managing Director for Caplin Systems. In this role, Tom will lead our ambitious growth initiatives and drive exceptional customer value. His focus will include expanding into the broader FICC and digital asset markets, enhancing our modular ‘buy and build’ component delivery, and advancing automation and innovation to strengthen the end-to-end client transaction lifecycle.

Product update July 2024

It has been a productive first half of the year here at Caplin. Read on to discover a host of new features available, and what else has been keeping us busy.

Collaboration - A Recipe For Success In Global Markets Digital Transformation

Winston Churchill is believed to have said, ‘Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.’ That might be true in politics, but in the context of managing a global markets digital transformation project, that’s hardly going to delight your clients, and even less so your bank’s management.

The Full FX Unfiltered - with Caplin

At the Full FX Conference in November 2023, CEO John Ashworth gave a talk entitled ‘AI - What’s all the fuss about?’ This prompted many questions from the audience, but unfortunately there was no time to answer all of them. In this video interview with Colin Lambert of The Full FX, John and Colin explore some of these questions.

Mood Changes in the FX Market 2023

Towards the end of each year, I like to look back and see what has changed in the world of FX. Sometimes it’s world events related, and the resulting impact on volatility. Other times, the theme has been mainly focused on regulation and how it will affect client and bank behaviour. In most years, one way to get a handle on these themes is to attend one of the many conferences that have started to re-emerge after the Covid winter.

WhereYouAt – a retrospective

For their grad project, Caplin’s 2021 intake of grads (Fabio, Dan H, Jiaxuan and Jonathan) decided to create a system that would allow everyone in the company to know who would be in the office each day. This was especially important at the time due to the lockdown restrictions of the previous year-and-a-half finally starting to be relaxed. Prior to this project, people typically added recurring events on Google Calendar, which was time-consuming if one wasn’t in on a predictable basis.

SEACON 2023

Using your curiosity to innovate through experimentation is something we value at Caplin, and something we do during our dev days and hack days. This year’s SEACON often focused on different kinds of experiments to enable a focus on delivering value as efficiently as possible – ideas that we can take into our daily practice and help us to continuously improve.

WeatherVanes hack day

The theme for Caplin’s Winter Hackday 2022 was ‘Bringing it all together’, meaning to take any of our existing stack, products, and tools, and see what synergies we could produce.

Summer internship 2023

Together with John Wall and Mansi Manoj, I spent this summer on Caplin’s internship programme, and I can say that ten weeks of the summer spent working for Caplin in London is the experience that every second year Computer Science student looks for in an internship.

QA Financial Forum London 2023

It was good to meet up with old friends and make some new ones at the QA Financial Forum 2023. There were a number of talks and panel discussions to listen to and learn from this year, ranging from European regulations to Chaos testing, and with a rich vein of AI/ML as a regular theme through the talks.

Building a Data-Driven Sales Analysis Dashboard with Dash, Plotly, and Logistic Regression

In today’s dynamic financial landscape, data-driven decisions are pivotal for successful sales strategies. The ability to visualise and analyse data before or during a sale can significantly impact outcomes.

Post-trade productivity boost

Mid-pandemic, the outlook for the global economy was pretty bearish, including the prospects for the banking sector. In May 2020, management consultants McKinsey in their report Time to radically rethink bank productivity, predicted a downturn that would last until mid 2023. They highlighted productivity gains as the solution and listed seven steps banks could take to survive the downturn and emerge stronger.

SalesIQ: Empowering FX Sales Dealers with Predictive Insights

Caplin hackdays happen twice a year and are a perfect opportunity to try new things, many of which end up in our products. The theme for our July hackday was ‘Smart Caplin’, and our team SalesIQ wanted to investigate whether we could use machine learning to transform our FX Sales dashboard into a powerful tool that would empower sales dealers with predictive capabilities and a deeper understanding of client behaviour.

URElf - Chrome extension to swiftly modify URL params

At Caplin, dev days offer an opportunity for engineers to take a break from their routine tasks, to delve into a side project or experiment with a new technology. During my recent dev day, I embarked on a mission to develop a Chrome extension, using React and Material UI, with the aim of simplifying the monotonous and sometimes error prone process of manually entering parameters on our app URLs.

Hack Day XVII – It's my bank in a box!

Caplin runs a biannual internal hack day competition for employees to work on fun projects and spike new ideas for future products. For this hack day our team comprised Lukmann Butt, Ed Pratt and myself. The aim of our project was two-fold:

Hackday 2021 - The Silence of the Lambdas

Since its inception over two years ago the Caplin Managed Services team has been responsible for building and maintaining Caplin’s SaaS cloud offerings. Our cloud infrastructure is handled by a DevOps toolchain made up primarily of Terraform, automated builds, and containerised deployments, with the goal of streamlining as much of the deployment and upgrade process as possible.

Smarter - HackDay 17

In engineering circles, you’ll sometimes hear stories of 10x or 100x developers who are incredibly more productive than average. This doesn’t mesh well with my own experience.

Discovery: Observability

The cloud demands a new mindset when considering availability of components. It is important to remember that there are no guarantees in the cloud, and it is the responsibility of the application to be self healing if there should be any loss of connectivity.

Active Market Space - Bank Tools to Solve Global Markets Workflow Challenges

In Spring 2019, our CEO John Ashworth wrote an article that was published in Profit and Loss Magazine on the Past and Future of Single Dealer Platforms and Portals. We looked at the technology drivers and what we saw as the current trends in that space. Based on our conversations with clients, this update looks at whether there have been significant changes since then.

Caplin grad programme 2022

I have been a graduate software engineer at Caplin Systems for a little over 4 months. I joined the graduate programme with a couple of other grads, and stepping on to Caplin’s floor was simply a happy experience. On our first day, we were warmly welcomed by the whole company, where we shared a little bit about ourselves and what brought us to Caplin. During the first week, we had a few welcome lunches to get to know each other and our future colleagues. Caplin could not have been more helpful. Any questions we had were answered fully and promptly, which made settling into the company very smooth.

JSWorld 2023 Recap

A few weeks ago I had the good fortune to attend JSWorld in Amsterdam, one of the world’s leading conferences focused on JavaScript web development. This was my first time attending a tech conference and it was a great experience. The three days were packed with dozens of talks from industry leaders, and I had the opportunity to chat about them with people from all across the globe. Theatre Amsterdam was a spectacular venue – its 500m2 movable screen has to be seen to be believed! I was swivelling my head as if watching a tennis match to read the text when they were using the full width of the screen.

eTrader FX Platform

BBVA is a Spanish multinational financial services company based in Madrid and Bilbao, Spain. It is one of the largest financial institutions in the world, and is present mainly in Spain, South America, North America, Turkey and Romania.

A Mobile Revolution

Over the past 24 months, Caplin has seen a significant increase in interest from banks in both developed and emerging markets to offer a mobile application to their corporate and institutional FX clients.

AtomFX for Sales Desks

Banco Santander, S.A. (also known as Santander Group) is the largest bank in Spain, operating globally with presence across the Globe, covering 30+ countries with a workforce of over 200,000 staff. Within the United Kingdom, Santander Corporate & Investment Banking (SCIB) offer their clients a range of services and products covering global markets, corporate finance, and global debt financing. Santander and Caplin have worked together since 2014.

Discovery: Simplified Scaling

Ideally we’d be able to scale resources up when demand is high and scale resources down when demand is low. For example, scale down at the weekend when there is no trading, scale up for Monday morning, and then scale up further if there is an alert that demand for resources has increased.

Service Discovery : Simplified configuration

In production, networked application stacks need to be able to easily locate the core components and the services that they provide within their network.

Internship 2022 – Pink FlaminGoing to Work at Caplin

Hiya! I’m V, a third year studying Computer Science at the University of Birmingham. Last year, I thought it’d be a good idea to get some experience working in a company after the end of my second year – this lead to me applying to Caplin’s internship scheme, one of the best decisions I’d made that year.

Reimagining Margin Administration – Summer Hack Day 2022

For this season’s hack day our team, Jack Cusack, Harry Hornby and myself, decided to focus on reducing the complexity and improving the transparency of price administration of an FX trading system without reducing or restricting the functionality, and having any modifications applied immediately.

Capital Markets

Caplin’s client is one of the largest consumer banks in the Midwestern United States, incorporated in Ohio. It has over 1,000 branches and around 20,000 employees. Caplin deals predominantly with the Capital Markets division of the bank, providing trade workflow tools since 2018.

Write the Docs – Prague 2022

This month I had the pleasure of attending my first ever documentation conference – Write the Docs! In fact, it’s the first conference I have ever been to. It was virtual this year but they are hoping to be back ‘in person’ by next year. I was very excited to meet more technical writers and see what I could learn from the talks. I’ve chosen to summarise just four of the talks, but there were many more. All the talks are posted on the Write the Docs YouTube channel.

Making the most of Cypress.io

Here at Caplin, we loosely adhere to the principles of the testing pyramid. That is, we limit the number of tests that are typically time consuming (to write, run and maintain) and strive to provide as much coverage as possible at the lowest levels of the pyramid e.g. with Unit Tests, which are fast to run and easy to maintain.

Running a Workshop on Enhancing Options

Sales management teams at many banks face the same challenge - how to encourage generalist sales with strong client relationships up the product sophistication curve without having to rely heavily on specialist product structuring teams.

Discovery: Embracing the Cloud paradigm

Discovery is Caplin Platform’s service discovery application that allows you to take advantage of the possibilities of cloud deployments or alternatively simplify non-cloud deployments. Discovery allows Caplin Platform components to auto-discover each other and automatically create a

How do you bring customers into your innovation process?

Picture this: a day of getting paid to work on something that you think is cool and interesting, working with your friends, beers, pizza and no one telling you what to do.

Hackday 2021 – Electroshock Therapy

This month, Caplin held its biannual hackday event. Developers got into teams of up to 3 and had 24 hours to produce something befitting this year’s theme: Speed. Along with my colleague Andrew Voneshen we formed the team “Driving Miss Daisy”; a film that personifies the term speed like no other!

Hackday – gRPC

Our streaming server Liberator serves financial data to browsers with low latency and high resilience. We’ve used it for trading and pricing all kinds of assets in web based trading systems, and particularly for FX.

Pass the Remote – Hack Day 2021

Module Federation is a new feature in webpack 5 that allows you to pull dependencies from external sources. Correctly configured, those imports can be dynamic, shared between multiple apps, and pull in any kind of module (utility, component or feature). What’s more, Module Federation comes with a host of comprehensive examples for many frameworks.

Empowering your sales team

FX salespeople of the world, unite! Rise up, resist the tyranny of trading technology spend. Wave your laptops and mobiles in the air, thump your kitchen tables or wherever you happen to be home-working and demand, “Give us the tools to be able to do our jobs and cover clients as they deserve!” An unlikely scenario, perhaps? But certainly, one every FX sales or business head should seriously consider.

Fintech Focus TV COVID-19 SPECIAL

Caplin CTO Steve South joins Toby Babb for an episode of Fintech Focus TV. He shares his insights into the growth of cloud-based trading, the challenges and solutions around the rapid adoption of new technology, as well as his approach and pursuit of dynamic, successful innovation.

Caplin Systems expands Chess sponsorship

The FX Pivot

At the start of May, I wrote an article called “The times, they are a’changin” which looked at the impact of Covid-19 on the functioning of the FX market and its participants. It was written eight weeks into lockdown and focused on the practical implications of what was then assumed to be a temporary state of affairs. What it did do was to examine some of the possible long-term effects on the way in which we work and look at the benefits of working from home and the development of systems and workflow practices that support that.

How technology has enabled the FX market to cope with the 'New Normal'

John Ashworth, CEO of web trading technology provider Caplin Systems, joins The TRADE virtually to discuss FX market participants’ response to market volatility amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and which technologies have become increasingly important during the crisis.

The Times, They Are a-Changin'

‘Back to normal’ – three simple words, and a world of meaning. For those in the UK, Monday, 23rd March 2020 marked the point at which everyone’s life changed. Lockdown has had, amongst many other effects, a profound impact on how and where we work and the very nature of the job we do. The financial markets in general, and the FX market in particular, are no exception. This article looks at some of the implications of the Covid-19 crisis in the FX market and considers what the ‘new normal’ might look like.

Caplin One, Single Dealer Platform ‘in a box’

Sydbank is one of the largest full-service banks in Denmark. It chose Caplin One, Caplin’s full solution in a single package, to deliver a MiFID II compliant automated FX trading solution for use by all customers, sales staff and traders.

Multi-asset Mobile Solution leads the way

Siam Commercial Bank Securities, the securities arm of one of SE Asia’s largest commercial banks, wanted to lead the drive away from passive saving and towards investing, tapping into its enormous client base.Being the first to market with a mobile application allowing private investors to trade investment funds and bonds as initial asset lasses was one of the main drivers of the project.

Write the Docs: Documenting your APIs using Postman

On Monday evening, Caplin was delighted to host the first Write the Docs London meetup of 2020 at our offices in Leadenhall Street.

A Day in Caplin: Priya, Finance

I’m Priya, Financial Accountant of Caplin Systems, and I joined the company almost four years ago. I have six years of experience in accounting, and I am currently studying towards ACCA with Caplin’s career development programme.

A Day in Caplin: Parsh, Quality Assurance

I joined Caplin around ten years ago as an SDET (Software Development Engineer In Test) when Caplin were based in Finsbury Square. I rejoined about a year ago, again as an SDET, but based now in Caplin’s new offices in Leadenhall Street.

A Day in Caplin: Emma, Project Management

Hi. My name is Emma, and I work as a Project Manager in the London-based Client Services team at Caplin. I have been working at Caplin for just over a year, and I enjoy liaising with clients and working with the team to meet our clients’ timelines.

A Day in Caplin: Andreas, Elias, and Jonathan (internships)

We are Andreas, Elias, and Jonathan, attending the 4th grade of a higher technical college for Software Development. Our school is located in Villach, Austria. We’ll graduate next year. All of us love travelling and getting to know new things, which is why we decided to work at Caplin in London this year. That turned out to be one of the best choices we made so far.

Caplin Adds Cryptocurrencies to Multi-Asset Trading Platform

Caplin, the specialist provider of desktop and mobile e-trading technology, today announced the addition of cryptocurrencies to its range of technology components for multi-asset trading.