Exegy Research Reveals 5x Cost Savings and 6x Faster FPGA Development vs. In-House Builds 

New York, London, Paris, St. Louis – October 29, 2025 – Exegy, a leading provider of market data and trading technology for the capital markets, today released Part II of its whitepaper series, The True Cost of Real-Time Market Data Infrastructure. The new report quantifies what it could potentially cost firms to build and maintain in-house, FPGA-based market data feed handlers.  

Key Findings: 

• Cost to build: Developing the first in-house FPGA feed handler costs firms approximately $5.35 million, with an additional $261,000 required per new venue. The complete North American Equities coverage (18 markets) would total close to $9.8 million dollars—over 5x more expensive than Exegy’s ultra-low latency FPGA feed handlers for the equivalent coverage ($1.8 million annually). 

• Maintenance: Supporting, optimizing, and managing FPGA feed handlers across 18 markets costs firms $4.59 million annually — more than 2x higher than Exegy’s ongoing managed service costs, including regular performance enhancements. 

• Time-to-market: Internal teams of four specialized FPGA engineers can spend over 3.5 years of engineering effort just to produce their first production-ready, FPGA feed handler versus only 6 months with Exegy. Each additional venue adds 8–12 months of development and testing, extending total time-to-market for full North American coverage to 6.5 years — compared to ~20 months with Exegy. 

• Resource allocation: Firms that build internally divert high-value engineering resources away from differentiating trading strategies and long-term growth initiatives. 

“These findings quantify what we’ve seen in the field for years,” said Laurent de Barry, Chief Product Officer at Exegy. “Firms that build FPGA infrastructure in-house often underestimate the true cost — not just in dollars, but in time, maintenance, and lost opportunity. Nexus embodies the alternative: a managed, FPGA-accelerated platform that delivers determinism and scalability without the overhead of building and maintaining it all yourself.” 

The whitepaper’s findings come to life in Exegy Nexus, the company’s latest FPGA-enabled market data and trading platform. Nexus combines centralized processing with hardware acceleration to deliver ultra-low latency performance, 36% lower operational costs, and a significantly smaller server footprint.  

By offloading critical market data processing to FPGAs within a compact 2U appliance and shifting additional data enhancements like book aggregation and filtering to a separate FPGA SmartNIC directly in the client server, firms gain the performance and scalability modelled in the research without the cost, time, or maintenance burden of developing in-house. Additionally, for firms looking to trigger orders at sub-300ns latency or to run custom pricing algorithm, Nexus leverages Exegy FPGA development framework to allow the deployment of user logic directly within the FPGA of the Nexus NIC 

Part II is available now for download. Part I, which focuses on software feed handlers, was released earlier this year and is also available on Exegy’s website. Together, the two reports quantify the real-world trade-offs between building and buying market data infrastructure — providing firms with a data-driven framework for smarter technology investment decisions. 

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Editorial contacts:  

Alice Jiga / Chrissa Diakanastasis  

Moonlight IQ  

Email: exegy@moonlightiq.com   

Tel: +44 (0) 20 7250 4770  

  

About Exegy Inc.   

Exegy is a global leader in low-latency market data, trading, and execution technology, delivering innovative, end-to-end solutions that power the world’s capital markets. Backed by Marlin Equity Partners, Exegy delivers comprehensive, end-to-end infrastructure solutions to a broad spectrum of market participants, including buy-side and sell-side institutions, trading venues, and independent software vendors.  

Designed for scalability, resilience, and operational efficiency, Exegy’s high-performance solutions leverage fully managed, purpose-built appliances, FPGA-accelerated systems, and advanced enterprise software. As the only global provider offering a full spectrum of latency solutions, Exegy enables clients to optimize performance, reduce complexity, and gain a strategic advantage in today’s complex trading landscape.  

With a client-centric approach and a commitment to continuous innovation, Exegy’s global team delivers expert solutions tailored to meet the evolving needs of the financial industry.  

For more information, visit exegy.com.