Published On : October 2026
Three questions sit behind every commercial decision made across the Latin America capital markets trading platforms and exchange infrastructure market: who buys the platform, who trades on it once built, and how the exchange operating it actually earns revenue. The three answers are more connected than they first appear.
Customer types include stock exchanges, securities depositories, clearing houses, brokerage firms, investment banks, asset management firms, pension funds and regulatory authorities. Trading participants, the people and firms actually placing orders once a platform is live, include institutional investors, retail investors, proprietary trading firms, market makers and broker-dealers.
Revenue models describe how the exchange or infrastructure operator monetises the platform itself: trading fees, listing fees, market data services, connectivity services, technology licensing and post-trade services. Which customer types a platform serves shapes which participants trade on it, which in turn shapes which revenue models are realistic.
Procurement models across these customer types also vary meaningfully: direct technology procurement, long-term technology partnerships, managed service agreements and infrastructure outsourcing contracts each carry a different balance of upfront cost, ongoing commitment and control, and the customer type buying tends to gravitate toward a particular procurement model more than the others.
Decision-maker roles differ by customer type in a way that shapes how a vendor should approach each one. A chief executive or chief operating officer typically leads a full modernisation decision at an exchange or depository, while a head of trading technology or head of market operations more often owns a narrower platform type or technology layer upgrade, and a regulatory affairs leader gets involved primarily where a purchase touches compliance or reporting obligations directly.
This report treats customer type, trading participant and revenue model as one combined lens rather than three separate segmentation questions because a vendor pitching a technology purchase to the wrong decision-maker, or describing a revenue model that does not match the customer type it is pitching to, tends to lengthen an already multi-year sales cycle rather than shorten it.
Stock exchanges are the most visible customer type, but securities depositories and clearing houses represent an equally significant buying group, often procuring separately from the exchange itself even when they serve the same national market.
Brokerage firms, investment banks, asset management firms and pension funds sit downstream of the exchange as customers of market data services and connectivity services rather than buyers of core trading infrastructure, a distinction that matters because their procurement cycles and budget owners differ from those of an exchange itself.
Regulatory authorities occupy a distinct position again, typically requiring direct or indirect access to surveillance and reporting data rather than purchasing trading infrastructure, which is why regulatory technology procurement often runs on a separate track from an exchange's own modernisation programme.
Sales cycle length differs by customer type as much as by deal size. An exchange or depository negotiating a full modernisation programme typically runs a multi-year strategic procurement process, while a brokerage firm adding a new market data or connectivity subscription can often complete that purchase within a much shorter cycle, closer to six to twelve months from first evaluation to signed agreement.
Contract value bands correlate closely with this same distinction: a small exchange project sized around a single platform type upgrade generally moves fastest through procurement, a mid-scale modernisation project spanning several platform types takes longer, and an enterprise infrastructure project covering most or all of an exchange's stack typically requires the multi-year, multi-stakeholder sign-off process described above.
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BUYER INSIGHT Budget ownership for exchange technology procurement sits most often with executive management or dedicated technology departments rather than with market infrastructure divisions alone, which shapes how quickly a modernisation business case can move from proposal to signed contract. |
Institutional investors and broker-dealers together account for the bulk of order flow on the region's larger exchanges, reflecting the concentration of trading activity among established financial institutions rather than a broad retail base in most of the eight markets this report covers.
Retail investor participation varies considerably by country, generally higher on exchanges that have invested in lower-latency, lower-cost trading platforms accessible through brokerage firms' own digital channels, and lower where exchange access still runs mostly through traditional full-service brokers.
Proprietary trading firms and market makers play a smaller but structurally important role, providing liquidity that keeps bid-ask spreads tighter on the asset classes they focus on. the asset classes these participants trade most actively tend to be the more liquid categories, equities and government bonds, rather than the newer, thinner markets such as digital assets and tokenised securities.
Vendor selection criteria differ noticeably across these participant types as well. An institutional investor's technology team weighs integration capability and reliability most heavily, since it is connecting an existing internal system to the exchange, while a proprietary trading firm typically weighs latency performance above nearly every other criterion, since even a small execution delay can erode the thin margins market-making activity depends on.
Retail investor growth also feeds back into which asset classes see the most participant activity, since retail order flow concentrates overwhelmingly in equities and, where available, exchange traded funds, rather than in fixed income, derivatives or the newer digital asset category, simply because those instruments are the ones retail-facing brokerage applications typically expose first.
Trading fees remain the most direct revenue model, charged per transaction or as a percentage of trade value, and remain the largest single revenue line for most of the region's exchanges even as they diversify into other models.
Listing fees, charged to companies for admitting securities to trading, provide a steadier but generally smaller revenue stream, one more exposed to broader economic cycles affecting how many companies pursue a public listing in a given year.
Connectivity services, charged for the physical or logical network access a broker or trading firm needs to reach the exchange's matching engine directly, have grown alongside proprietary trading and market-making activity, since low-latency connectivity is precisely what that participant type is willing to pay a premium for.
Market data services and connectivity services have become an increasingly important secondary revenue model, monetising the same trading activity twice, once through the trading fee and again through the data or connection fee charged to firms consuming that activity. the technology licensing strategies used by leading providers show a similar pattern, treating the underlying platform itself as a product some exchanges license out rather than only operate for their own market.
Post-trade services, covering the fees charged for clearing, settlement and related processing, round out the revenue picture and are typically the least visible to retail participants despite representing a meaningful share of an exchange group's overall commercial model.
Technology licensing, the practice of an exchange group licensing its own trading platform software to other exchanges rather than only operating it for its own market, has grown into a meaningful revenue model in its own right for the region's larger, more technically capable operators, effectively turning an internal cost centre into a commercial product sold to smaller neighbouring markets.
Contract value bands for these revenue models scale with customer type as much as with trading volume. A small exchange project generating primarily trading fee revenue looks very different, commercially, from an enterprise infrastructure project layering market data, connectivity and technology licensing revenue on top of core trading fees, which is why two exchanges of similar trading volume can still generate meaningfully different total commercial value from otherwise comparable platforms.
For a technology provider entering this market, understanding which revenue models a given customer type already depends on is often a better starting point for a commercial pitch than leading with platform capability alone, since a proposal framed around the buyer's own revenue diversification goals tends to resonate more directly than a purely technical one.
Stock exchanges, securities depositories and clearing houses are the primary buyers of core trading infrastructure, while brokerage firms, investment banks, asset managers and pension funds buy mainly market data and connectivity services downstream of it.
Institutional investors, such as asset managers and pension funds, trade on behalf of underlying clients or fund beneficiaries, while proprietary trading firms trade using their own capital, typically providing liquidity rather than managing client assets.
Exchanges combine trading fees, listing fees, market data services, connectivity services, technology licensing and post-trade services, with trading fees typically remaining the largest single revenue line.
Which customer types a platform serves shapes which participants trade on it, and participant mix in turn shapes which revenue models, such as trading fees versus market data monetisation, are realistic for that platform.
Rarely as core trading infrastructure. Regulatory authorities typically require access to surveillance and reporting data generated by a platform rather than purchasing the trading platform itself, so their procurement usually runs on a separate track from an exchange's own modernisation programme.
A full modernisation programme negotiated by an exchange or depository typically runs as a multi-year strategic procurement process, while a brokerage firm adding a market data or connectivity subscription can often complete that purchase within six to twelve months.
A larger, more technically capable exchange group can license its own trading platform software to smaller neighbouring exchanges rather than only operating it for its own market, turning an internal technology capability into a separate commercial revenue line.