None of it needs to be final, and approximate answers are fine. With these six, the first conversation is about your market rather than about ours.
- Asset classes and instrument count
- Equities, fixed income, futures, options, rights, ETFs or something else — and roughly how many instruments at launch versus in three years. It determines whether you are a single-server venue or a distributed one.
- Session model and calendar
- Do you want an opening auction, a closing auction, trade-at-last after the close, a maintenance window? Which holidays, which half-days, and whether any instruments need their own timetable.
- Clearing arrangement
- Whether you clear yourself or through a central counterparty, and at which levels limits must hold — clearing member, trading member, end investor, or all three.
- Settlement and CSD
- Your settlement cycle, your depository or registry, and your banking integration for the cash leg. The engine emits clearing messages into that arrangement; we need to know its shape, not to own it.
- Members and how they connect
- How many member firms, and what mix of the bundled front-end, order-management systems over the HTTP/JSON API, and FIX 4.4 sessions. This sizes the conformance programme more than anything else.
- Regulatory regime
- Your regulator, and what it requires of records, surveillance and market-conduct reporting. It shapes what the audit trail must expose, and to whom.