Saxo Bank adds new authentication flows, streaming solution to OpenAPI
Saxo Bank, one of the leading edge developers of proprietary end-to-end trading systems, has made further developments to its OpenAPI solution which now gives greater versatility to firms wishing to use the system to develop their own trading systems with Saxo infrastructure.
Pioneering developments within technology-led retail trading platforms are an important part of the fabric of today’s trading environment.
Saxo Bank, one of the most avantgarde and technology-led developers of comprehensive trading systems, continues to evolve its opensource trading platform solution, this week by adding a new streaming solution along with new authentication flows to the OpenAPI connectivity technology which allows Saxo Bank’s trading infrastructure to be incorporated into the front end software of any financial institution that wishes to offer its clients an electronic trading service alongside its standard range of products.
In redesigning the authentification flows of SaxoAPI, Saxo Bank has now engineered them to be fully compatible with the OAuth 2.0 specification. This significantly reduces the time it takes to implement authentication flows, and allows developers to use any available OAuth client instead of implementing the authentication flow from scratch.
The company’s SAML based authentication flows will keep existing for the foreseeable future, but Saxo Bank strongly encourages all developers to use the new OAuth based flows.
As far as the new streaming solution is concerned, Saxo Bank has added a new service that is purely based on standard websockets and with a binary wrapper format. This makes it easier to implement streaming in any programming language, especially those where SignalR is not well supported, and the binary wrapper allows for optimized handling of received messages.
Additionally, Saxo Bank has removed the requirement for cookies. Until now the firm has required cookies to be included in all requests to OpenAPI, which often caused troubles for developers developing apps outside of the browser, where cookie support is often not a default, or developers of distributed systems where cookies needed to be kept in sync. With this release, cookies are no longer required for any OpenAPI endpoints, so while Saxo Bank will still return cookies with Saxo Bank responses, these can safely be ignored from now on.
Saxo Bank’s OpenAPI solution is about to enter its fourth year as the underpinning connectivity solution for Saxo Bank’s new range of platforms which include SaxoTraderGo and SaxoTrader Pro, both of which FinanceFeeds has been among the first in the world to experience at the launches in Paris in 2015 and London in 2017 respectively.
Commencing the launch of the SaxoTraderPRO platform was London-based Saxo Capital Markets CEO Andrew Edwards, who welcomed institutional partners and private clients, and expressed his perspective that the UK is a very important market for Saxo Bank and especially for SaxoTraderPRO, largely due to the proliferation of sophisticated traders that operate across the United Kingdom. Mr Edwards also underlined that this is a very interesting time for Saxo Bank, not least because of the new ESMA regulations, expressing that the company envisages new growth opportunities within this new regulatory environment.
At the launch, Mr Fournais underlined that the tading technology of the platforms have always been the core of Saxo Bank’s commercial ethos, stating that the company’s senior management are very proud to have launched the new SaxoTraderPRO product which is tailored to active traders and institutional clients.
Recently, Mr Fournais detailed this to FinanceFeeds by explaining in his notably enthusiastic manner, “In operating as a true multi-asset provider, our aim is to cater for the specialties of each of the asset classes because, for example, an equities trader is not like a futures trader or an FX trader, therefore we must engineer our trading platform so that it meets the needs of each type of trader, which is an important aspect, but the entire environment needs to be in one place, on one platform.”
“We launched our first proprietary trading platform in 1998, thus we became a fintech firm before the term was created” – Kim Fournais, CEO, Saxo Bank
Three years previously, at Saxo Bank’s head office in Hellerup, Denmark, FinanceFeeds met with the lead developer of the OpenAPI solution, Benny Boye Johansen, Senior Director & Head of OpenAPI, Saxo Bank who explained in detail the ethos behind its development.
“Everything you see in the new SaxoTraderGO trading platform is accessed and executed via the OpenAPI but not everything is yet available to third party developers” said Mr. Johansen. Currently we are focusing on the endpoints necessary to support a good trading experience. As we get comfortable with the reliability and scalability of this section of the API, we will gradually extend the functionality on offer” said Mr Johansen.
“It is important to understand that this is our own API and there is one API only. We do not use an internal API for our own systems and provide a different one for clients. The functionality of the entire SaxoTraderGO trading platform goes through this API.” With OpenAPI we really are “eating our own dog food” he said.
“If you want to work with the OpenAPI as a developer, you can get a developer login and then access the portal which contains over 100 pages of documentation as well as samples and a tutorial” said Mr Johansen.
Since its inception, Saxo Bank has made a series of continual upgrades to the OpenAPI solution, a very recent example of which was reported by FinanceFeeds late last month, which importantly introduced new tick sizes when placing FX orders.
Until this upgrade, FX instruments only had one tick size which was defined by the field ‘TickSize’ under instrument details. After the change is implemented, the API will operate with three separate tick sizes when placing orders as defined by our report.
