Why Canada's biggest bank is hiring all the engineers it can find

Customers want much more information, including data on counterparties to help judge the risk of doing a deal. For example, is a big buy order coming from a giant mutual fund company or a high-frequency trading shop? RBC can combine its massive data sets with custom code to help provide answers to these sorts of questions. Mudassir, RBC's director of global algorithmic trading, said that competition is fierce from hedge funds and the other big investment banks as well as emerging technology companies that have their eyes set squarely on Wall Street. Mudassir didn't provide names, but venture-backed companies applying machine learning to trading include Sentient Technologies, Alpaca and Walnut Algorithms.