Axpo
Building a tailor-made trading platform
Axpo needed to replace its end-of-life intraday trading platform with one that was also capable of optimising its extensive hydropower assets against rapidly changing price signals across European markets. Achieving that level of responsiveness and control required a bespoke design tailored to Axpo’s trading strategies and operating model.
The old system had a range of limitations common to legacy IT: siloed functionality, fragmented workflows, performance bottlenecks, and a dislocated user experience. Driving forward its bold technology strategy, Axpo was creating an integrated application ecosystem: Trader Cockpit. The replacement trading platform would join this ecosystem, enabling streamlined workflows, faster development, and an overarching view of the market.
After years of Scott Logic’s support for its strategic technology projects, Axpo had a clear knowledge of our capabilities and engaged us to lead on delivering the new platform. Working in close collaboration with stakeholders, we built from scratch a highly performant, user-centred platform tailored to Axpo’s specific needs and fully integrated within the Trader Cockpit ecosystem. The quality of the build was such that it inspired confidence in Axpo to opt for a full go‑live as soon as the platform was ready.
Ultimately, the deliverable had to hit the mark. Incorporating the traders' requirements, the team created something truly exceptional. Yet the path to get there was equally remarkable – every team member on the project clearly made it their personal priority to deliver excellence.
Roman von Siebenthal, Head of Spot & Forward Trading, Axpo
Boosting trader efficiency through UX design
The existing platform constrained the traders’ user experience in various ways, and there was limited interface customisation. Furthermore, the intraday trading platform was separate from the algo trading platform. All of this fragmentation increased the traders’ cognitive load and impaired their efficiency.
From day one, our designers worked with Axpo’s internal UX team to create a consistent design system for the new platform, one which would integrate seamlessly with Trader Cockpit. In close collaboration with the Product Owner, who knew the traders and workflows well, we ran a Discovery phase that surfaced the deficiencies of the existing system and the opportunities to drive efficiencies through the new system. As development progressed, the Product Owner added to the formal review process by seeking on-the-fly feedback from colleagues on the trading floor as the interface took shape.
In this way, we designed and built an interoperable desktop for the new platform that allowed each trader to personalise and save customised layouts tailored to their exact needs. In this modular layout, the user could view manual trades alongside algo trades. The unified feel with the wider Trader Cockpit ecosystem further reduced the cognitive load and enhanced the traders’ user experience.
Engineering a platform for high performance
Some performance constraints were intrinsic to the legacy system. It recalculated the same market data independently for every user, which caused the system to slow down or become unstable when multiple users were logged in. As a consequence of this, it was necessary to run separate server instances for analytics, which could leave users working from slightly out‑of‑sync views of the market. Taken together, these limitations created a system that was unreliable in the fast‑moving conditions of intraday trading.
Working with the Axpo team, we introduced a fundamental architectural shift from ‘processing per user’ to a shared background process with a shared cache. The new architecture ensured that every trade and every algorithm worked from the same fast, real‑time data. This delivered consistently high performance for both human users and automated strategies, even at peak activity.
The new platform produced real‑time analytics that could be consumed by other Axpo systems, enabling faster decision‑making across the wider trading ecosystem. The team also built an intelligent order‑entry component that supported decision‑making. In the face of changing market conditions, it recommended suitable actions and trading algorithms in real time, helping traders respond faster and with greater confidence.
Importantly, building a bespoke platform also allowed Axpo to control its own pace of innovation. Rather than waiting on a vendor to prioritise change requests, in-house traders and engineers could update, deploy and test new trading strategies in hours, not weeks. This autonomy is critical in markets where speed, differentiation and rapid learning cycles determine performance.
Inspiring confidence in a full go-live
Our earlier engagements had demonstrated to Axpo the value of rigorous testing, so they embraced it again for this platform. We shaped a robust test strategy that combined extensive automated and manual testing, and which ran from day one of the build phase. Our test engineers gained a deep understanding of trading logic and algorithms, becoming near-expert users.
We ran regular demos for stakeholders throughout the build phase, earning their confidence in the platform's quality. These demos were a joint effort with our team colleagues from Axpo. While the team was initially composed mostly of Scott Logic consultants, more Axpo software engineers joined over time, bringing the composition to around 50/50. This facilitated knowledge transfer and fostered joint ownership of delivery. We organised in-person meet-ups every 6–12 weeks in Baden, Edinburgh and Madrid, which helped create a culture of transparency and trust.
This resulted in seamless collaboration between developers, designers and testers from Axpo and Scott Logic, producing a highly stable platform with minimal defects. Axpo’s original intention had been to release the new platform first in read-only mode, then in shadow mode. Instead – as a sign of the confidence Axpo had gained through our open and transparent collaboration – they decided to put the new platform into full operation straight away, relegating the legacy system to shadow mode.
The project was a great success thanks to true Business–IT co-creation and thanks to the extraordinary effort and a lot of passion from the whole team. Working seamlessly across organisational and geographic boundaries while harnessing the best talent and maintaining rigorous governance was no small achievement. The greatest reward came in witnessing the traders' enthusiastic embrace and approval of the developed solution.
Marco Nideröst, Head of Models & Optimisation, Axpo
Delivering a futureproof platform
Working closely with Axpo, we delivered a bespoke, scalable, and high‑performance trading platform that aligned perfectly with the company’s market approach.
Axpo’s traders enjoyed a massive uplift in user experience, with multi-market visibility, desktop-style flexibility, and personalised layouts optimised for rapid data-driven decision-making. All of this was fully integrated into Trader Cockpit’s workflows and design patterns, allowing traders to adopt the new interface without extensive training.
Meanwhile, bringing manual and algo trading together allowed human traders and algorithms to work side-by-side using the same accurate data. The removal of platform performance bottlenecks was incredibly timely: EPEX SPOT recorded a 12.5% year‑on‑year increase in intraday trading volumes in 2025, heightening the need for fast, resilient platforms. And this is just the beginning. The bespoke build puts the future in Axpo’s hands, enabling them to evolve the platform in line with business needs and to adjust their trading strategies at market speed.