TD Asset Management (TDAM) and cloud infrastructure platform Beacon announced a new partnership today to build new capabilities and scale existing workflows for TD Bank’s $398 billion investment arm.

New York City-based Beacon implements its cloud-native and cloud-agnostic platform for financial institutions, saving them from hiring tech talent to build and maintain in-house platforms, Beacon co-founder and chief executive Kirat Singh told Bank Automation News.

“I think the technology landscape has changed a lot; instead of being on-prem infrastructure, it’s all cloud-hosted,” Singh said. “[TDAM does] trade commodities, but they wanted to scale up their commodities trading operation, and we are pretty strong in commodities.”

The partnership has been in the works since the start of this year, with TDAM striving to increase its trading capabilities using a cloud-based platform, he added.

“Our selection of Beacon enables us to build new functionality faster and enhance our risk management systems. By utilizing Beacon’s comprehensive front to back functionality, we gain far greater scale while integrating Beacon with our existing systems right out of the gate,” TD Asset Management head of retail distribution, enablement and operations Jeff Robertson said in a statement.

Capturing market opportunities

Beacon previously built similar tools for Goldman Sachs’ SecDB risk management platform and JPMorgan’s Athena cross-asset platform.

Beacon’s previous solutions run on the coding language Python, and Singh estimates that JPMorgan’s Athena platform contains “10 or 20 million lines of Python coding right now.” The fintech provides its clients with a solution containing analytics, reporting and applications, and hosts large quantities of data in a code base.

The fintech’s solution makes it possible for customers to extract funding, credit, risk analysis or pre-trade data and analyze it to quickly capture market opportunities in a scalable fashion, Singh told BAN.

“[Beacon] essentially gives you unlimited compute on the cloud, which you can just spin up literally by hitting F9 [on a keyboard] in a browser like Google Chrome,” he said. “So, I think we just allow people to focus on their edge.”