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Don DeLoach, President & CEO, Aleri

Amid the widespread panic that was going around the financial markets over the past couple of months, a banker in Paris said "Banks are reacting emotionally to this. The actual issue is in fact, quite small. However, it is the emotional response that has banks reluctant to extend credit at this moment". After a long pause, he added, "If this is what happens now, what will we do when the crisis is real"? Wow. I hadn't seen that one coming. He was actually asking just the right question. We will return to this later.

I think it's safe to say that 2007 marked a turning point in commercial event processing technology. It was the year when CEP went from being an extremely obscure technology with very little awareness beyond the early pioneers, to a sudden explosion of awareness and interest in the commercial technology arena.

By one estimate, there are 40 plus pools of liquidity in the U.S. Industry pundits expect European markets to also embrace dark pools post-MiFID. With Regulation NMS, MiFID, and algorithmic trading further compounding liquidity fragmentation on both sides of the Atlantic, is it any wonder why algorithmic trading and liquidity discovery have become the hot topics for buy side and sell side firms globally? With these topics, a set of new challenges emerges ranging from the micro- to the macro-level; a few key challenges are highlighted for discussion in this article.

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