New Acuity Trading research and development hub opens in Spain

CEO, Andrew Lane signed the constitution for Acuity Analytics in early June. The new Spanish company is Acuity Trading’s latest expansion into Europe as part of a strategic growth plan. The centre will be dedicated to bringing together deep expertise in data science and machine learning to improve existing, tech-based capabilities and to develop emerging technologies that will power the future fintech industry. 

Andrew Lane, CEO said, “We continue to lead the fintech market with alpha generating alternative data and highly engaging trading tools using the latest in AI research and technology. To maintain this momentum and meet the need for new, future focused technologies to support the evolving fintech market it is essential to invest and create a R&D collaborative hub that will enable us to fast track the development of successful technologies”.

The new company will serve as a hub to foster collaboration between Acuity’s fintech industry experts and its team of academics who are based at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC). The incorporation of the company is another example of Acuity Trading’s sustained investment in R&D and commitment to greater collaboration across academic and commercial sectors.

The hub is designed to provide an advanced working environment bringing together Acuity’s UPC partners to enable the swift transition of R&D innovations from academia to market. The facility will enable Acuity Trading to develop new and cutting edge technologies which in turn will benefit the wider global fintech market. The Barcelona location means that the advances in AI and NLP technology developed by Acuity’s UPC academics can be directly passed to Acuity’s Spain-based product and commercial team and then efficiently and effectively rolled out to drive innovation and better support the banking and investment sectors.

Professor Argimiro Arratia, heads up a team of Acuity Trading academics who work out of UPC Barcelona.

“Establishing Acuity’s R&D hub in Spain fulfills a long-term personal goal of having an industrial lab associated with our faculty where we can apply our research in Computational Finance and witness our ideas turning into tangible, commercial products.

“We are very excited about the impact that this hub will have on our future prospects as we continue to strengthen our research with the assistance of our best Engineering and Mathematics graduates,” adds Argimiro.

The gap between quantitative data advances, NLP, AI and academic research is seamlessly bridged by Ariel Lopez and Gustavo Avalos, two members of the Acuity Trading commercial team who began their careers in data academia.

Acuity chose Spain as the location for its new hub for both its talent and its potential. Spain’s Start-Up Act, unveiled in December 2020 by the Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, is accompanied by a 10 year strategic plan to turn the country into an ‘Entrepreneurial Nation’ by 2030. According to TechCrunch, the broad-brush goals for the strategy are to increase growth in startup investments; attract and retain talent; promote scalability; and inject innovation into the public sector so it can bolster and support Spain’s digital development.

The incorporation comes hot on the heels of the acquisition of Signal Centre by Acuity Trading’s London based HQ.