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.
EP3 by Connamara Technologies has been nominated for Best Matching Engine for Exchanges and Electronic Trading Venues by TradingTech Insight Awards – USA 2025 from A-Team Group.
These awards recognize “excellence in trading solutions and services for capital markets and focus on vendors providing exceptional trading infrastructure, trading technology and data solutions.”
Also nominated in this category are Aquis Technology, GMEX and IONLIST.
Winners will be announced in June 2025.
Spotlighting Leading Innovators in Capital Markets TabbFORUM’s NOVA Awards, honors the financial industry’s ongoing commitment to technology-driven innovation and recognizes, in particular, companies that excel and stand out from the crowd.
The NOVA honors go to 40 organizations based on recent and sustained accomplishments in innovation. They range from major exchanges, market infrastructures and information networks, to high-performance technology and trading platforms, niche data providers and blockchain developers focused on institutional and capital-market applications.
While attending the International Futures Industry Conference in Boca Raton, Daniel Davis, Head of Growth at Connamara Technologies, discussed with TABB Group CEO Bruce Morris how the start-up costs to create a marketplace have fallen dramatically, as has the time it takes to get to market, for all asset classes. Dan also talks about the cloud’s role in the evolution of exchange technology.
FIA’s Boca conference always delivers, and BOCA50 was no exception. In fact, it was an unrivaled success by any measure – record-breaking attendance, extraordinary speakers, lively panels, and, not to be forgotten, Cheap Trick!
Here’s how it went for Connamara Technologies, by the numbers:
📈 5 of our most innovative exchange customers in attendance—up from 3 last year. Exciting to see the growth of EP3!
🤝 30 scheduled meetings with customers, prospective customers, regulators and interested investors.—a new record for us. Still tallying up the countless “bump-ins” that make Boca special
🏓 2nd time hosting the pickleball clinic. Some have taken to calling us the “pickleball people”, thankfully others know us for being the “default DCM technology”
🏆 The 22nd Boca for our founder, Jim Downs. That’s more than two decades of market insights, relationships, and innovation.
We’re already looking forward to Boca2026.
VIA PR Newswire
LONDON – Connamara Technologies, a leading provider of exchange technology, announced that co-founder and chair Maureen C. Downs was honored with the “Trailblazer Lifetime Achievement Award (vendor)” by WatersTechnology at the Women in Technology and Data Awards in London on March 7, 2025.
This award was presented to the candidate who has “affected change within her organization and has acted as a mentor for female colleagues and women in general.”
For 30 years, Maureen has been a trailblazer in capital markets and financial technology. She has served in key leadership roles at brokerages, trading firms, trade associations, and regulatory bodies, including two terms as the first woman Chair of the National Futures Association, the self-regulatory body for the U.S. derivatives industry, from 2020-2024.
In 2022, Maureen co-founded Connamara Technologies, Inc. Under her leadership, Connamara developed and launched EP3®, an end-to-end exchange and clearing platform that is asset-agnostic, cost-accessible, and quick-to-market. EP3 is powering new exchanges and marketplaces across the globe.
Maureen was one of 125 freshman women selected for admission to a student body of over 6,000 men when the University of Notre Dame first began admitting female students. She graduated summa cum laude and 1st in the College of Business. Subsequently, she pursued careers as a Certified Public Accountant and Attorney at Law at a time when women represented only a small fraction of the professionals at most major firms. Maureen rose to prominence in the U.S. derivatives industry – an industry that, to this day, remains largely male-dominated.
Chosen from a group of accomplished women in the capital markets and financial technology industry, Maureen’s achievements are something that Connamara Technologies is proud to celebrate.
WatersTechnology is a leading information source for technology trends in capital markets. For a complete list of winners, click here.
About Connamara Technologies
Connamara Technologies is the leading provider of fully-integrated exchange infrastructure, empowering new and existing exchanges to operate with exceptional efficiency and reliability. Its EP3® platform is a new breed of exchange and clearing technology that seamlessly integrates all key functions into a single, robust platform. It is cost-accessible, adaptable, scalable and quick-to-market. Engineered for the evolving needs of the next generation of exchanges and marketplaces, EP3 is shaping the future of financial markets.
To learn more, please visit www.connamara.tech or connect on LinkedIn
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Contact
Daniel Davis, Head of Growth
[email protected]
Today, Connamara Technologies announces the release of the new Trade Clearing API for EP3.
An exchange using a central limit order book is responsible for managing the transaction that occurs when the price of a buy order matches that of a sell order. What happens next, post trade, is the clearance and settlement of the trade. This is, among other things, where the buyer transfers the funds used to buy the asset to the seller, and the seller transfers the purchased asset to the buyer. This process is loosely called Trade Clearance and Settlement.
While EP3 does provide the functionality for the clearance and settlement of trades made in the EP3 matching engine, some Exchange Operators choose to use third-party clearing and settlement services for this process.
Because EP3 offers the Trade Clearing API, Exchange Operators can create the workflows and interactions necessary to utilize the services of third-party clearing providers.
At Connamara Technologies, we continually strive to improve how our customers interact with the EP3 platform. A key pattern we put in place when we first designed EP3 was to allow our customers to interact with the functionality and data within EP3 via a set of well-defined and easy-to-use APIs.
