Can you give us an overview of TP ICAP's technology footprint in Belfast, and what makes it a strategically important location for the firm's engineering capability?
Belfast is an important hub location for TP ICAP with technology as a cornerstone. Our technology footprint spans endtoend delivery: from core application development and platform engineering through to cloud, data, regulatory reporting, and the supporting operational processes and tooling necessary to build and run systems within our production environment. Teams in Belfast work on critical systems that support front office trading globally, alongside posttrade processing and fulfilling regulatory obligations across multiple business units, asset classes, and technology platforms. Belfast forms a key part of the company’s transformation goals to modernise critical trading platforms towards cloudnative architectures working in collaboration with AWS and aligned with the firm’s broader cloud and AI goals.
What makes Belfast strategically important is the combination of scale, capability, and maturity. 2026 is TP ICAP’s 10-year anniversary in Belfast and across this period we’ve built a deep pool of experienced technologists who don’t just execute requirements but actively design, modernise, and evolve our technology platforms. Belfast is a place where we build products, not just support them.
The location also gives us access to a strong and growing local talent market, supported by close links with both local universities and the wider tech ecosystem. We are actively investing in longterm capability, developing future leaders, and maintaining continuity in critical engineering areas. TP ICAP Belfast is a highly resilient, costeffective, and innovative engineering base playing a central role in how we scale technology, manage risk, and deliver change globally.
What does "bespoke" software development mean in practice at TP ICAP and what are the key benefits of building technical infrastructure in house as opposed to adopting an existing vendor solution?
At TP ICAP, bespoke software development means, rather than adapting our business to fit the constraints of an offtheshelf product, we build platforms and infrastructure that are deliberately designed around our needs and the specific markets, workflows, and regulatory obligations we operate within.
Our engineers work closely with the business to design systems that reflect the real complexity of interdealer broking and electronic markets: the trade lifecycles, the assetclass nuances, the non-functional and latency characteristics, alongside the complex regulatory reporting demands. Our requirements are unique and evolve constantly as markets, regulations, and client expectations change. When this happens, we need to respond quickly; owning our platforms allows us to move at our own pace rather than waiting for vendor roadmaps or release cycles.
Being bespoke doesn’t mean reinventing everything from scratch. We deliberately build on commoditised components where it makes sense: cloud infrastructure, managed services, standard protocols etc however the control logic, data models, integrations, and proprietary workflows and domain expertise that differentiate TP ICAP are developed and owned inhouse. That gives us endtoend ownership, from design through build, operate, and run, allowing us to constantly evolve when necessary.
What are the core engineering principles that guide how your development teams build and maintain proprietary platforms?
At TP ICAP, our engineering principles are designed to balance innovation with the realities of operating at scale in a highly regulated, alwayson market environment. Stability, resiliency and scalability are key tenets that underpin our technology estate and form the basis of everything we build.
Our teams own their platforms endtoend and are accountable for designing, building, operating and evolving the platform over time. This ownership mindset drives higherquality engineering, more resilient operations, and faster issue resolution. Observability, telemetry, security, and the ability to effectively support platforms in production are critical to delivering change frequently and safely, with the ability to recover quickly when things go wrong. These capabilities are fundamental to resilience and operational control.
We value strong fundamentals: clean code, test automation, clear architectural standards etc but we also emphasise collaboration and continuous learning. Our goal is to build scalable and resilient systems that work reliably for the business every day.
How does AI fit into the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) at TP ICAP?
When we talk about AI at TP ICAP, we’re very deliberate about positioning it as an enabler of the SDLC, not something that sits outside it or bypasses existing controls. AI fits into the SDLC in the same structured, governed way as any other technology, with additional guardrails where justified.
From a requirements and design perspective, AI helps teams explore options more quickly by refining requirements, identifying edge cases, and validating architectural patterns, for example. However, engineers and architects remain accountable for design decisions, and our development standards require that designs explicitly address security, resilience, and compliance before delivery can begin, regardless of whether AI tooling was involved.
During development, AI assists productivity with code generation, refactoring, documentation, or test creation all benefitting from the tools. This generation accelerates delivery and improves consistency with the output treated the same as humanwritten code. It goes through peer review, automated testing, and security scanning as part of our CI/CD pipelines like code by any other author. Our SDLC explicitly mandates checks including security controls, static code analysis and riskbased testing, which apply equally to all code including AIassisted code.
AI doesn’t redefine our SDLC, it strengthens it when used correctly. AI simply helps teams move faster and make betterinformed decisions within that framework, rather than cutting across it. This approach allows us to adopt AI safely and pragmatically while remaining fully aligned with the regulatory, security, and resilience expectations of a financial services environment.
As Cyber criminals become more resourceful in the age of AI, How do you characterise the current threat landscape facing FinTech organisations and has the nature of attacks changed significantly in recent years?
The threat landscape facing FinTech organisations has become both more sophisticated and more industrialised over the last few years with AI accelerating that trend rather than fundamentally changing the game overnight.
At a high level, we still see the same core objectives from attackers: data theft, disruption, financial gain but the tools and techniques have evolved significantly. AI is enabling cyber criminals to automate reconnaissance, scale attacks more efficiently, and make social engineering far more convincing than it was even a few years ago. Focusing on Phishing and social engineering, AI can generate realistic, welltargeted messages at scale, which increases the likelihood of initial compromise. This means the human layer of defence (awareness, controls, and culture) is just as important as technical safeguards, if not more so.
Attackers increasingly look for the weakest link rather than attacking core systems headon. In a complex, interconnected technology estate, that makes visibility, monitoring, and strong vendor governance critical. Has the nature of attacks changed? Yes, as has the speed, scale, and adaptability of attackers. However, the fundamentals of good cyber defence haven’t changed. Strong identity controls, leastprivilege access, patching, segregation, monitoring, and incident response remain essential and must be implemented far more rigorously and consistently than in the past.
At TP ICAP, our approach is therefore defenceindepth and riskbased. We assume breach, we build layered controls, and we treat cyber security as a continuous discipline rather than a compliance exercise. The organisations that succeed will be those that combine strong technology controls with clear governance, skilled people, and a culture that takes cyber risk seriously.
What was the strategic rationale for adopting AWS as your primary cloud provider and can you summarise the benefits of cloud versus on-prem?
Our move to AWS was a deliberate strategic decision rather than a purely technical one. It was underpinned by our need to support scale, resilience, and speed in a business where technology is fundamental to how we operate and compete. AWS were also keen to collaborate to help us progress our technology platforms in our modernisation journey.
We operate globally, across multiple asset classes and time zones, with very high availability requirements. Cloud infrastructure allows us to scale capacity up and down dynamically and to design for resilience across regions. That level of elasticity and builtin redundancy is extremely difficult and costly to achieve consistently in a traditional onprem environment. Speed to market is also a critical tenet of Cloud. Infrastructure provisioning that used to take weeks or months can now be done in minutes through automation shortening feedback loops, enabling more experimentation, and encouraging small, incremental changes rather than large, highrisk releases. This is critical when responding to regulatory change, market evolution, or client needs. All this with the backdrop of security, tooling, monitoring, and controls that would be hard for most firms to replicate internally at the same depth.
To be clear, cloud doesn’t remove the need for good engineering discipline. It raises the bar. You still need strong architecture, security standards, automation, and operational ownership. But when combined with those principles, cloud becomes a genuine force multiplier, enabling TP ICAP to modernise faster, scale safely, and focus more of our engineering effort on building differentiated capabilities rather than running infrastructure.
How do you attract and retain top engineering talent in Belfast in an increasingly competitive market?
Belfast has a very competitive technology landscape so attracting and retaining great engineers requires much more than just offering interesting roles. To be successful you have to provide meaningful work, longterm career growth, and an environment people genuinely want to be part of.
First, the work itself matters. Engineers at TP ICAP work on real, complex problems that sit at the heart of global financial markets, building and modernising missioncritical platforms, operating at scale, and working in a highly regulated environment where quality and resilience genuinely count. That sense of purpose and impact is a big draw for experienced engineers who want their work to matter.
Second, we invest heavily in people and career development. We’re very deliberate about building depth of capability in Belfast, not just headcount. That means structured learning, exposure to modern technologies like cloud and AI, opportunities to work across different domains, and clear progression paths into senior technical or leadership roles. Our message to engineers is simple: your growth is our future.
Third, culture is key. We operate with a high degree of trust and autonomy, supported by modern engineering practices and flexible working models. Teams are empowered to make decisions, take ownership of their platforms, and balance delivery with sustainability. That flexibility is increasingly important, particularly as expectations around worklife balance have evolved.
We also benefit from Belfast’s wider ecosystem: strong universities, a growing tech community, and close collaboration with industry partners. That allows us to bring in earlycareer talent, support them as they develop, and retain institutional knowledge over time. Taken together, our approach is about building a sustainable engineering community in Belfast, not just hiring for today’s needs. By investing in people, trusting teams, and giving engineers meaningful problems to solve, we’ve been able to attract and retain strong talent in a market where competition continues to intensify.
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