On March 7, 2025, Maureen Downs was awarded the Trailblazer Lifetime Achievement Award (Vendor) at the WatersTechnology Women in Technology and Data Awards.
Following her win, WatersTechnology asked Maureen to share some thoughts about her professional background and her career journey. In this Q&A, Maureen discusses her successes and challenges, offers thoughts on mentorship, and reveals the best career advice she ever received.
maureen-downs-connamara-witad-waters0325Although Connamara has been a well-respected name in capital markets technology for over a quarter of a century, our EP3 exchange platform has only been part of the conversation for 3+ years.
We launched EP3 to fill a demand in the marketplace for an end-to-end, asset-agnostic, cloud-first, exchange and clearing solution that offers fast deployment and cost-accessibility. The quick take-up of EP3 has exceeded our every expectation.
With innovative customers like Interactive Brokers’ ForecastEx predictions exchange, ZeroHash’s stablecoin platform, Brazil’s BEE4 tokenized stock market and ArchitectX’s perpetual futures exchange, EP3 has quickly established itself as a new breed of technology for the next generation of exchanges.
The TabbFORUM NOVA Awards honor the financial industry’s commitment to technology-driven innovation by recognizing 40 organizations for their outstanding achievements. As TabbFORUM noted in placing Connamara in this top 40:
“Experience with traditional markets and EP3’s fully integrated technology propelled EP3 to become a go-to vendor for start-up marketplaces”
Connamara’s fellow NOVA Award recipients include some of the largest and most forward-thinking players in capital markets today, including:
* Fintechs offering enabling technologies for capital markets like BMLL, Exegy, Chainlink and Broadridge.
To be included among this impressive group of innovators is truly a monumental honor for Connamara and EP3.
SAVE THE DATE!
The Association of Futures Markets and EP3 by Connamara Technologies are pleased to announce that AFM Tech Day 2025 is coming to Chicago, USA on November 14 at the Union League Club.
Join us for insightful discussions on implementing exchange solutions, the latest tech trends and industry insights.
Stay Tuned – more details coming soon.
We are continually enhancing the functionality and performance that EP3 offers exchange operators. In response to customer feedback, EP3 now supports the following:
Improved Performance Observability
EP3 now produces additional Prometheus metrics that allow exchange operators to monitor and alert on end-to-end performance of order entry. These metrics measure the time from order arrival at the FIX Gateway to the publication of the FIX execution report acknowledging the order.
Dependent Services Health Checks
All EP3 services implement the gRPC Health Check Interface. This allows developers utilizing any EP3 API to first determine the health of dependent services prior to interacting with the API.
Performance Updates
Several performance updates were made to EP3 and EP3 components during March including: the reduction of message size on the critical path to decrease message bandwidth and increase throughput, updating of decimal libraries to increase order entry throughput and performance, improved the time to recover services when there are large numbers of users and accounts present in EP3, and improved database query performance.
Banking Service Enhancements
The Banking Service manages deposit and withdrawal workflows between EP3 and commercial banks. Several functional enhancements were made including making it easier for Exchange Operators to verify cash held in a commercial bank account versus the value recorded in EP3.
Trading API Update
Exchange Operators can now implement manual or automatic order approval workflows by previewing orders before submission to the matching engine.
