smartTrade buys Celoxica to move into listed markets

smartTrade Technologies SAS, the Aix-en-Provence-based vendor of foreign exchange and payments software, said yesterday it has acquired Celoxica, which is now part of the smartTrade Group. Its release gave no price, currency, structure, seller, conditions or completion date, though it describes the deal as done.

Celoxica, headquartered in London, runs ultra-low-latency trading services (extremely fast order and data handling) for listed equities, futures, fixed income and options. Listed markets are exchange-traded, as opposed to over-the-counter (OTC) markets. Its latency ranges from software-based single-digit microseconds to field-programmable gate array (FPGA) hardware chips programmed for nanosecond speed, across more than 80 trading venues.

smartTrade leads in workflow orchestration, pricing and distribution, through products including LiquidityFX and kACE. Celoxica leads in risk and execution infrastructure: feed handlers and market access gateways (software that takes in venue data and routes orders to venues), order execution engines and in-line pre-trade risk (risk checks done before orders go out). smartTrade said the deal extends its coverage from OTC to listed markets, and from pricing to execution infrastructure.

The layers are complementary, so clients buying pricing, aggregation and distribution from smartTrade can now get listed-market execution with pre-trade risk from the same group. Celoxica clients gain access to smartTrade’s connectivity, aggregation, order management system (OMS), analytics and artificial intelligence tools. Celoxica’s technology is also opened to smartTrade’s more than 250 clients.

Vincent, CEO and co-founder of smartTrade, framed the combination as a joint offer:

We are convinced that, together, we offer our clients something much more valuable than either of us could offer alone.

Vincent, smartTrade

Bouhelier, General Manager of Celoxica, continues to lead the business and joins smartTrade’s Executive Committee. He said Celoxica’s team, leadership and way of working with clients stay unchanged, and the release states that client relationships, contracts, support and day-to-day service are unchanged too.

Follows the kACE deal

On 11 December 2025, BGC Group announced an agreement to sell kACE Financial to smartTrade, in a transaction valued at up to $119m. The price was $80m initially plus up to $39m contingent on performance metrics.

smartTrade’s release says the Celoxica deal builds on its previous acquisitions that expanded the group’s ecosystem of products.

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