Best Execution caught up with Paul Humphrey, CEO of BMLL, which recently secured $26m of Series B investment to support the firm’s growth strategy.
Tell us what has been happening with BMLL Technologies lately?
I am very proud to say that we have raised $26 million in our Series B funding round led by Nasdaq Ventures, FactSet, and IQ Capital’s Growth Fund to fuel BMLL product and geographic expansion. This investment is testament to a shared vision; that all market participants should have access to the most granular data and analytics in a scalable data science environment, to better understand trading behaviour and reimagine the markets of tomorrow.
We’ve also launched BMLL Vantage, which is the out-of-the-box data science visualisation tool for US and European equities and ETFs. BMLL Vantage is a continuation of our mission of democratising access to the most granular Level 3 market data and analytics by allowing a greater number of market participants to compete in what has typically been the preserve of only the most sophisticated quantitative firms. BMLL Vantage goes one step further by enabling the research that previously only quants could do. In other words, our intuitive no-code data and visual analytics application gives the non-technical user insights that would otherwise require a quant resource.
Given your successful funding round, what will be your focus in 2023?
We will expand our content and grow our customer base. We will also grow our presence, commencing with opening an office in the USA.
Our plan is to go deeper into existing asset classes. BMLL has specialised in equities, ETFs and futures. We’ve done well by sticking to our rails and not deviating from that. By becoming golden in our coverage of those asset classes across USA, Europe and Asia, the partnership opportunities and use cases will increase exponentially.
We also want to expand the engineering team to onboard and harmonise the data, expand our products, widen our analytics capabilities, and bring the data and analytics our clients love to new markets.
Lastly, we want to expand our go-to-market footprint, strengthening our presence in the US and bolstering our team in the EU. This will enable us to continue the strong revenue growth we’ve seen over the past two years.
What do you think is fuelling the demand for Level 3 data?
Market participants come to us for a number of reasons. Sell-side firms use BMLL data to carry out detailed order book analysis in order to optimise algo performance and improve client execution outcomes, as well as managing execution risk and reporting more effectively. Buy-side firms identify new sources of alpha and trading signals, and improve execution analytics by integrating our data and analytics into their trading workflows. Exchanges and trading venues have also been a client segment where we have seen a lot of success, because they’re constantly looking to optimise their liquidity provision and execution quality, and we help by providing them with insights into market structure dynamics.
What do different types of customers do with access to the data?
To provide some examples, Kepler Cheuvreux’s teams conduct order book analytics to optimise algo performance using BMLL Level 3 data. BMLL helps Aquis Exchange provide its members with insights into market structure dynamics, while SIX Group uses BMLL data for customised order book analytics for the Swiss EBBO. Further, Jefferies carries out detailed order book analysis for passive/aggressive trading strategies using BMLL data.
In addition, regulators and academic institutions increasingly need Level 3 data. The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) is a customer which is using BMLL data to examine order behaviour, and NYU’s Quant Team carries out research on the futures market at the university’s Mathematics in Finance Program.
Why are investors getting excited about Level 3 data?
Our investors believe that the time is now for Level 3 data. IQ Capital has been with BMLL since its early stages and, as a deeptech fund, it identifies markets that need change, or markets that have reached some sort of impasse that would be solved with new technology. IQ Capital was keen to back the BMLL vision of going into Level 3 data as deeply as possible with the most accurate source of data. In their view, if you get that piece right, you can always move up, whereas it’s not possible to start with Level 1 or Level 2 data and move down. My gratitude goes to our investors for believing in our mission, backing our strategy and helping us make it a reality.
Decisive leadership has clearly played a role towards BMLL’s successful growth strategy. Can you tell us your secret?
Leadership is about making decisions and empowering others to do the same. Take the decision to execute a strategy and get things done, rather than creating a strategy and thinking that’s the goal. Strategy is nothing without the courage to implement it. The key to creating a decision-making culture is to ask your leadership team, “So what would you recommend?”, and give them the courage to execute.
Those that have worked with me will have heard me say, “If you’re not making any wrong decisions, then you’re not making enough decisions”, and “I’d rather see a well executed reasonable strategy than a badly executed good one!”
Any last words?
Well, we have more work to do! We listen to clients and their requirements for additional data sets, analytics bundles and asset classes, building their feedback into our products.
It has been our mission to democratise access to Level 3 data and analytics capabilities and we will continue to build on the work we have done to date, accelerating our growth strategy as a result of our funding round. I’d like to specially thank my team for their unwavering dedication to customer services and product development, as well as our esteemed clients for their support. I am immensely proud of the outstanding industry recognition we have gained.
