First up in our introduction to the distinguished nominees for Leaders in Trading 2023 Editors’ Choice Awards, we bring you the shortlist for Outstanding Exchange Group – one of The TRADE’s highly coveted and legacy awards for the exchange community.
The role of the exchange group has shifted significantly over the last few years, evolving from simply providing platforms to facilitate buying and selling to become ever-expanding data and platform universes that span the lifecycle of a trade. Exchanges must now offer a diversified toolbox to remain competitive in an increasingly complex marketplace.
Among the key players in this competitive landscape, The TRADE has selected Cboe Global Markets, London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG), Nasdaq and SIX Swiss Exchange for our 2023 shortlist, following various individual achievements by these exchanges over the past year.
Cboe Global Markets
Cboe Global Markets makes another appearance in this award category shortlist for 2023, following its win at last year’s Leaders in Trading awards gala. The exchange has continued to drive innovation within financial markets by extending its remit through various product launches. In March, Cboe Global Markets launched a new real-time US options market data solution named Cboe One Options Feed, with the offering utilising a single market data feed to provide a real-time view of US options pricing derived from Cboe. The trading venue also launched its Cboe 1-Day Volatility Index (VIX1D) in April, which seeks to measure single trading day volatility. Developed by the firm’s in-house innovation hub, Cboe Labs, the VIX1D Index measure the expected volatility of the S&P 500 Index over the current trading day. In the same month, Cboe selected Broadway Technology to become the infrastructure service provider for its interdealer US treasuries trading platform, Cboe Fixed Income, which became the exchange group’s first move into fixed income.
Meanwhile, Cboe expanded the trading period for its high yield and investment grade corporate bond futures to 23 hours per weekday, in June, to help investors manage their credit portfolios. Elsewhere, in July, Cboe introduced a new periodic auction book (PAB) to lit sweep order types, which allows participants to sweep the local Cboe PAB or dark book, before sweeping the local Cboe lit book – in an effort to improve liquidity targeting for users. The exchange also made multiple senior appointments to support growth strategies within the business. Most recently, Catherine Clay was promoted to the role of global head of derivatives.
The London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG)
LSEG re-joins this award category – after also being nominated at Leaders in Trading 2022 – following the announcement of several new initiatives and expanded partnerships in 2023. Among these was the exchange group’s push into retail trading in April with the launch of Turquoise Retail Max. The new service is aimed at supporting European retail brokers in meeting best execution obligations and delivering price improvement and is accessible through LSEG’s Turquoise Plato Lit Auctions order book. Hudson River Trading and Stifel became the first liquidity providers to use the service.
Later announced in May were two expanded partnerships, including an initiative with OpenFin to deliver its flagship Workspace platform to clients and a multi-year strategic partnership with Barclays in the same month spanning the “full ecosystem of the business”. LSEG’s FXall also partnered with Tradeweb in August to launch a new FX swap workflow solution for local currency emerging markets. This followed a strategic alliance with Saphyre to digitise client onboarding for the buy- and sell-side.
Over the last year, the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) has made a number of key appointments to help steer strategic growth initiatives. Most recently, The TRADE revealed that Richard Worrell will join the exchange group as head of secondary markets sales and business development in January 2024.
Nasdaq
Following a busy year of new solutions and technology announcements, Nasdaq also joins the roster for Outstanding Exchange Group for 2023. Most recently, the exchange announced the launch of a new Custom Basket Forwards solution in a bid to address the market’s demand for more simple and efficient methods to handle equity exposures. Looking outwards, Nasdaq’s technology has been employed several times throughout the year by third parties looking to expand their remits.
The Dhaka Stock Exchange extended its technology partnership with Nasdaq in January to support its expansion into new market areas. The Stock Exchange of Thailand (SET) launched a new trading system, alongside market data distribution and market surveillance systems, based on Nasdaq technology, in June. This was followed by Brazilian stock exchange group B3 and Nasdaq jointly developing a new clearing platform for the Brazilian stock exchange in July in a bid to innovate operations as the market continues to expand. Elsewhere, Bolsa Electrónica de Chile (BEC) revealed that it would move its operations to the cloud by the end of 2024, initially by upgrading its current on-premise Nasdaq technology to Nasdaq’s SaaS-based Marketplace Services Platform.
SIX Swiss Exchange
Over the past year, SIX Swiss Exchange has continued to drive innovation through initiatives designed to make navigating fragmented markets and liquidity more efficient – leading to another nomination in this category for the exchange. Late last year, Redburn (Europe) joined SIX Swiss Exchange as its newest trading participant, making it the sixth new entrant to join the venue in 2022. This followed the addition of Virtu ITG Europe (a subsidiary of the New York-based market maker Virtu Financial), Grammont Finance, CLSA (UK), China International Capital Corporate (UK) and Hardcastle Trading.
SIX Digital Exchange received regulatory approval from the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) in January to support the issuance, trading and settlement of bonds denominated in EUR. The exchange expanded its closing auction offering in April to protect the buy-side when executing large orders. The new functionality, Closing Auction Volume Discovery (AVD), helps asset managers reduce their impact by giving them the option to execute orders without being visible to the wider market. Among the exchange’s other key new initiatives was the expansion of its closing auction offering. The new functionality which went live in May, named Auction Volume Discovery, was made in consultation with both the buy- and sell-side. The order type was designed to unlock the latent liquidity sitting on the side-lines during scheduled auction periods due to participation cap constraints. In the same month, SIX integrated with FlexTrade’s Spark EMS to bolster streaming of real-time global market data. The offering provides access to global market data across various outputs as well as an off-the-shelf trading solution that can help reduce time-to-market for new fund launches.
Earlier this month, SIX launched SIX Connect, an expansion of its cloud connectivity offering which leverages network-as-a-service provider, Megaport’s reach. The new expansion is set to cover more than 100 cloud regions as well as several hundred data centres globally.