What it actually costs to build your own front-office integrations, bots and agents

Your core platform is live. Your trading systems run. Then the requests start arriving.

Your traders need live prices in their spreadsheets. Your sales desk needs to push axe data to clients without every counterparty having to build their own connection. Your operations team needs trade confirmations captured from chat and booked into your system of record without manual re-keying. Your technology team is being asked to build AI agents that pull from internal systems and deliver outputs into the tools where people actually work.

The instinct is always the same: we'll build it.

It feels like the right call. You have engineers. You understand your own data. You want control. But teams that go this route consistently underestimate the effort required to build services that move data reliably between systems, workflows and users, and what it costs to maintain those services and their infrastructure once they exists.

We know this because we've been on this journey ourselves. We've built and grown our service over many years so our customers don't have to. Here is what that experience tells us about what building actually costs.

The real cost of building front-office solutions

Most teams go in expecting a six-month project. In practice, building financial data integrations from scratch, including the scoping, the architecture decisions, the security reviews and the rework when a vendor API turns out to work nothing like its documentation, typically takes six to eighteen months before anything reaches production.

By the time it does, the engineering and infrastructure bill has usually landed somewhere between $500,000 and $2 million. That figure covers salaries, cloud infrastructure and tooling. It does not cover the harder-to-quantify cost of pulling your best engineers off your core product for the better part of a year.

And that is before the ongoing costs begin. A live integration does not look after itself. Most teams need three to five engineers dedicated to maintaining what they built: updating features as usage grows, patching APIs when vendors push updates, managing security vulnerabilities and unpicking the subtle bugs that only appear at scale. Research consistently shows that over five years, build projects in this space cost roughly three times the initial investment: a compounding liability that most teams do not price in at the start.

The faster path is buying from a specialist that has already absorbed those costs. ipushpull deploys in weeks rather than months. We maintain the connectors. When a vendor updates their API, we handle it. When a security patch is needed, we deploy it.

The same pattern across different firms

Firms that have tried to build are often the most direct about what it cost them.

TP ICAP, one of the world's largest inter-dealer brokers, spent years trying to build a live price screen that would deliver real-time options prices directly into clients' desktops. The legacy platform they had was difficult to support, offered only delayed updates and had no extensibility beyond Excel.

'We had spent years trying to build a decent live price screen for our clients,' said Seb Carême, Global Head of Fusion at TP ICAP. 'With ipushpull, it took just a matter of weeks to deliver our live prices direct into our clients' desktops and workflows.'

TP ICAP had no shortage of engineering capability. What they lacked was a platform that already had the connectors, the permissioning, the delivery logic and the maintenance model built in.

NatWest Markets faced a different version of the same problem. Distributing axe data to clients used to mean the sales team building bespoke connectivity to each counterparty individually. Investors on the receiving end had to build their own connections to every dealer, a task most found cost-prohibitive. The result was stale data and missed trades.

'Customers should not have to launch a technology project just to be able to consume our data,' said Matthew Harvey, Head of Cross Product Sales and Development at NatWest Markets. 'ipushpull aligns to our philosophy of being easy to do business with.'

With ipushpull, NatWest Markets went from idea to production in weeks. They started in credit, expanded into rates and have since extended into foreign exchange.

The same problem applies to AI agents

When firms move into AI agents, the infrastructure challenge is the same and can often be larger. Building an agent that reliably ingests data from internal systems, applies the right permissions, delivers outputs into the right workflows and maintains a complete audit trail is a substantial engineering commitment before the model does anything useful.

Koch Energy Services, one of North America's largest physical gas traders, partnered with ipushpull to address exactly this. Physical gas traders work across multiple chat windows simultaneously, negotiating in real time using compressed, abbreviated language. Every confirmed trade still had to be manually entered into internal systems, creating errors and slowing execution.

Together, we built an LLM-enabled agent that reads trader chat in real time, extracts the required booking fields, and books trades directly into Koch's energy trading risk management system, with human oversight kept in the loop at all times. Trade input time fell by around 75% across more than 50,000 trades processed on the platform.

'If you think about all the different departments you have to touch to get something like this built, the ETRM team for the integration, a data science team to train the LLM, trading to generate the training data, then compliance and legal, having a packaged solution has significant advantages over building it yourself,' said Tim Flynn, IT Leader at Koch Energy Services. 

The honest comparison

For teams still weighing the decision, here is the comparison.

Time, cost and headcount figures based on ipushpull’s experience with customers.

The instinct to build is not wrong. It comes from the right place: ownership, control, understanding your own systems. What changes after you have been through it once is the recognition that connectivity infrastructure is not where that instinct pays off. The firms in this piece had the engineers. What they lacked was the years already spent solving the problem.

That is what ipushpull provides. Why not speak to one of our specialists?