FPGAs are widely used in low latency trading. Most market data feed handlers and order passing adapters are done in FPGAs today - they offer better latency than software solutions and processing time is deterministic.
I suppose if you are literally only bound by processor speed it might help. But bringing it all together into a working system will take some effort. Had you considered offloading to GPUs instead?
Did he say why? It's hard to see what the motive for this is.