The TRADE is delighted to introduce the shortlist for our Editors’ Choice Award for Outstanding Trading Technology Provider. These shortlisted trading technology providers have all experienced great years and achieved outstanding performance. Learn more about the candidates below, including BTON Financial, Broadridge Trading and Connectivity Solutions, FlexTrade, Instinet, ION Markets and TS Imagine.
BTON Financial
BTON Financial – which offers asset managers a solution for best-execution – uses machine learning to continuously improve its decision making on order routing destination for trades. The firm offers a technology platform that can used collaboratively by asset managers, where a statistically relevant TCA data set can shared and leveraged by users.
Over the past year, BTON Financial added a rules engine module to its solutions, enabling financial firms to automate workflow, alongside ensuring compliance with in-house rules such as no trade lists, position limits and ESG metrics. In addition, the solution allows differentiation for which trades should be ‘high-touch’ and which are suitable to be passed straight into execution algos. BTON Financial states that the solution is a very flexible product that can be used in a variety of ways depending on firm’s existing set up and/or procedures.
Broadridge Trading and Connectivity Solutions
Broadridge’s middle-office solution is a front-and-back-office agnostic SaaS solution that provides firms with the ability to achieve operational efficiency and cost effectiveness by automating and simplifying street and client middle-office workflow. This enables clients to focus on exception management, the reduction of complexities, and the elimination of the gaps between trading, clearing and reporting.
Over the last year, Broadridge made a strategic investment into creating a stand-alone middle-office solution, driven by demand from clients that faced the high cost of disparate solutions/workflows and being dependent on front or back-office solutions. Broadridge’s asset class coverage includes equities, fixed income, SWAPs, options, futures and ETDs, alongside the standardised integration with front and back-office applications.
Broadridge’s post-trade solution, NYFIX Matching, facilitates intraday allocations and improves post-trade processing, while mitigating end-of-day risk. The solution allows the buy-side to allocate and affirm trades with brokers and prime brokers and arrange for payment and settlement with their custodians through one consolidated platform. NYFIX Matching is ready for a T+1 settlement cycle and can send trade and allocation details to prime brokers, on T+0, after a trade is matched.
FlexTrade
Over the last 25 years, FlexTrade’s core mission has been to solve challenges in the front-office by providing ultra-high performance, customisable multi-asset trading technology underpinned by a strong focus on innovation and deep client partnerships. This year, FlexTrade has continued focus on that mission, making strides in building out its multi-asset solution, FlexTRADER EMS.
In 2021, multiple Tier 1 asset management firms with a cumulative $3 trillion of asset under management chose FlexTRADER EMS as a technology partner for equities, FX and fixed income execution management. This includes T. Rowe Price for fixed income, APG Asset Management for multi-asset EMS and Coronation for global equity and derivatives trading. This year, FlexTrade also successfully launched its OEMS solution, FlexONE, in EMEA.
Elsewhere, FlexTrade has made improvements to the overall architecture of its solution to reduce custom code, improve client onboarding, reduce time to market and enhance scalability of the solution. According to FlexTrade, clients are being moved across to the new architecture and are benefiting from the ability to increase trading volumes without performance degradation.
Instinet
Since its inception in 1969, Instinet has led with the viewpoint that technology can bring greater efficiency to financial markets. Today, as part of Nomura Group, Instinet’s global agency models offers services that range across the entire investment life cycle. Instinet has built adaptive technology, leveraging decades of experience to fine-tune its capabilities to an ever-changing marketplace and to meet the evolving needs of its clients.
As a company, Instinet provides the institutional investment community with a range of tailorable solutions, including market insights and commentary, full service trading desks, advanced algorithmic trading strategies, access to unique and specialised liquidity through a range of crossing pools, and a set of workflow solutions engineered to help clients manage their investment processes efficiently.
According to Instinet, its agency model focuses primarily on client performance and transparency, with the aim of assisting clients with achieving best execution and achieve better performance.
Last month, Instinet completed the acquisition of FIS’ execution services business, formerly known as Fox River. FIS’ execution services unit offers execution solutions including trading algorithms and execution services, including direct market access and sales trading. Once fully integrated, the new offering will be called Instinet Fox River Quant Solutions and will be delivered alongside Instinet’s core solutions business. It will initially be rolled out in the Americas with scope for this to expand in the future.
Earlier this year, Instinet expanded the remit of its block trading venue in Asia to include a conditional order book to help users minimise costs and market impact when trading large orders. Now known as BlockMatch Asia, the non-displayed alternative liquidity pool for equities trading consists of a standard dark continuous limit crossing order book, a market on close book offering primary exchange auction closing prices and a new conditional book for the submission and management of conditional orders.
Elsewhere, Instinet became the first executing broker for the Appital platform ahead of its launch. Through the collaboration, any flow formed and negotiated on the Appital platform by asset managers can be executed via Instinet. The equity capital marketplace and bookbuilding platform aims to give buy-side users access to deal flow they might not have previously been able to, allowing institutional investors to execute large orders in pan-European hard to trade stocks by “unlocking” latent liquidity.
ION Markets
ION Markets provides technology and data solutions to financial institutions dealing in equities, fixed income, foreign exchange, cleared derivatives, asset management, and secured funding. The trading technology provider’s capital markets solutions digitise and automate workflows, bost efficiency, and enable better decision-making. ION Markets continuously innovates and designs solutions and services to allow clients to achieve more at a lower cost and to be more successful in the long term.
Over the past year, ION Markets launched a new compliance SaaS solution as part of its asset management offering. The solution evolved from the provider’s hosted compliance solution, delivering an automated compliance checking process, greater investment transparency, as well as the ability for real-time oversight of pre- and post-trading – covering all asset types and geographies.
Elsewhere this year, ION Markets enhanced LookOut, a multi-asset equities trading solution for investment firms, both on the buy-side and sell-side, as well as trading venues, delivering a larger range of data monitoring with near real-time regulatory reporting and business analytics.
TS Imagine
In 2021, cloud-based SaaS trading applications provider TradingScreen and Imagine Software merged to form TS Imagine, backed by private equity firm Francisco Partners. Leveraging knowledge and decades of experience between both companies, TS Imagine provides a SaaS-based trading, portfolio management and real-time risk solution. The trading technology provider offers capabilities across asset classes in trade analytics and execution, order management, portfolio monitoring, real-time risk analyses, compliance and margin calculations.
With increasing innovations in blockchain and crypto trading, TS Imagine leverages existing technology to make it easier for clients to find liquidity and increase exposure to digital assets within a secure framework. In addition, connectivity to multiple trading venues using a Smart Order Router (SOR) facilitates best execution at a given point in time.
TS Imagine considers access to liquidity as a top priority for its global asset management clients, with constant additions of new connections to partners that can provide liquidity discovery opportunities. In April, equity capital marketplace Appital integrated its bookbuilding platform with TS Imagine to bring innovation and automation to the market, and to unlock liquidity more efficiently. TS Imagine also has plans to build a more sophisticated fixed income trading platform to provide access to different market venues and direct dealer connectivity to source bond liquidity and reduce trading costs.