Trading technology company Options Technology has announced 150 new jobs at its Belfast base, alongside a major acquisition.

The company, headed by Danny Moore, will create the posts at its Belfast city centre base over the next 18 months, effectively doubling its current headcount. It said hiring will commence immediately.

The company, which provides trading software and analytics to the capital markets sector, has also bought ACTIV Financial, a New York headquartered provider of financial market data, for an undisclosed sum.

The deal has been backed by Boston private equity firm Abry Partners which had previously announced financing for Options Technology in early 2020.

“We believe that merging the ACTIV data feed and software capabilities on top of the Options global network and infrastructure is probably the most impactful deal in the sector in the last decade,” said Danny Moore, Options’ President and Chief Executive Officer. “The industry has been crying out for a true next-generation platform focused on the coming decades, near zero latency, global, on modern hardware, fully Cloud Integrated, and fully backward compatible. Merging our platforms will bring all that and more.”

Options describes itself as a global capital markets services including cloud-enabled managed solutions, global trading infrastructure and telemetry analytics services. It first opened a Belfast office in 2014 and now employs close to 150 people in the city.

“Since setting up in Belfast in 2014, we’ve grown the office to be our largest location globally, attracting some of the best local talent. The ACTIV acquisition will mean further growth for Options, and we are delighted to be able to leverage the highly-skilled talent pool in Belfast and throughout Northern Ireland as we continue to grow our engineering and technical support capabilities.”

Meanwhile, Steve McNeany, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder at ACTIV Financial, welcomed the deal.

“The acquisition of ACTIV Financial by Options is an extremely exciting time in our history, and we are confident this deal will deliver a highly differentiated and competitive offering to both our current clients and the market as a whole. We believe this is the start of a new era in the market data industry providing unparalleled, fully managed market data services globally with our clients set to benefit from a wide range of strategic synergies.”

Danny Moore is no stranger to scaling businesses at speed, having been at the helm of trading technology firm Wombat Financial Software when it was sold to NYSE in 2008 for $200 million, prior to which he worked for First Derivatives in Newry.

Before joining Options Technology, Mr Moore founded Lough Shore Investments, a venture capital firm. One of its investments was a film The Shore, written and directed by Terry George, filmed on location in Northern Ireland which won an Oscar at the Academy Awards in Los Angeles.

Founded in 1993, Options Technology began life as a hedge fund technology services provider. Today, the company provides high-performance managed trading infrastructure and cloud-enabled managed services to over 200 firms globally