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Rick Lane is the CEO of Trading Technologies.

What will be next watershed for the industry in 2017?

The Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivery model has already fundamentally changed many other industries, and we feel that the professional trading industry is now ripe to see that disruption as well. The impact SaaS will have with respect to lowering the barriers to best-in-class technology, increasing accessibility to the world’s financial markets, and driving down the cost of trading technology ownership for all participants, means that firms who wish to remain competitive in today’s trading environment will be hard-pressed to stick with legacy, classically deployed technology. And with increased levels of accessibility, we expect to see the professional trading community expand, which is good for everyone.

What changes does 2017 have in store for financial technology?

I think we’ll see firms in the industry really prioritize unlocking the potential of data. Although we all know market data is important, by combining that market data with your own trade data and by leveraging the right tools to manage these large data sets, you have the ability to unlock insights that have historically been unobtainable. It’s not that this type of data hasn’t always been stored; to the contrary, compliance laws have required us all to store this data for years on end. But gaining insight in your trade data stored on tape backup in a closet at your futures commission merchant is more than likely impossible. We simply haven’t been using the right technologies to do it largely because the right technologies have only become accessible in the last few years. But by utilizing tools that collect your trade data, secure it, store it and make it available to you in real-time, you can create an asset from something that has historically been a burden to you. We expect to see a tremendous uptake in the usage of these types of technologies in 2017.

Is there any topic/hype that should be left in 2016?

Blockchain. Will it play a role in our industry? Yes. Will it be the disruptive force many have claimed? If the answer were yes, I believe it would have happened already.