What do you believe were the contributing factors behind the successful year that led to this award?
Last year was a fantastic year for the FlexTrade team globally, welcoming new clients to the buy- and sell-side FlexTrade client community, including the most recently announced Alecta and Liontrust in EMEA and JonesTrading in North America.
To answer the question, at our core, we are an engineering firm uniquely positioned as a provider of both buy- and sell-side technology, which gives us a holistic view of the entire capital markets trading landscape. We’re privately owned, which has been the case for almost three decades, meaning we are unconflicted by our ownership regarding the course we can set.
The outcome is close collaboration with clients, partners, brokers, and fintech firms in our broader ecosystem to rapidly deliver trading innovation for our customer base and groundbreaking change for the wider industry.
Could you outline some of the main achievements and milestones from the year?
On the buy-side, we’ve worked extensively to address the current trend around direct-to-buy-side connectivity, where liquidity providers of various types create private, curated price streams for the buy-side, who can then engage at their own discretion. We expect this area to continue growing as we move into 2025.
On the fixed-income side, we’ve continued adding new features to our EMS, FlexFI. This includes launching a new data lake to allow in-house quant analysis of trading data, continuing our work to build deep venue integrations, and offering our clients, like T. Rowe Price Associates Inc., the choice of third-party integrations they need, such as Propellant Digital. Additionally, several new clients successfully implemented FlexFI in 2024 and are live and in production using the solution.
In the FX space, we’ve made further progress in establishing FlexTrade’s digital asset offering. Notably, we’ve integrated with Coinbase Prime, an institutional prime-broker platform for digital and crypto assets. We’ve also announced a strategic partnership with LSEG’s FXall and new FX integrations for clients, such as Tradefeedr’s pre-trade forecast data via API.
On the sell-side, we undertook an award-winning deployment of FlexOMS to JonesTrading, which selected the solution as its full-service technology platform for its equities, electronic trading, and outsourced trading desk business lines.
Additionally, we continued to see the rapid growth of our integrated order and execution management system, FlexONE OEMS, which has been selected globally by several hedge funds and a raft of high-profile fund launches in EMEA, North America, and APAC.
How do you plan to build on this success?
2025 looks like a packed year for the FlexTrade team globally on both the buy- and sell-side, and from our perspective, it is brimming with opportunity across a few different themes.
In the hedge fund space, firms want to do more with less. Sophisticated workflows are not only for the biggest funds anymore. We see demand for systems with robust compliance, allocation, order marking, strong APIs, and automation capabilities to support various trading strategies, as well as the ability to add new pods or asset classes quickly and seamlessly. Our integrated OEMS, FlexONE, is well positioned to capture this demand.
On the sell-side, desks are reviewing technology and looking to adopt solutions that can scale as their business requirements evolve and provide the optionality to add new asset classes or strategies as the market or their client demand dictates.
As a broader theme, industry consolidation and M&A activity across the buy- and sell-side have seen a flurry of potential acquisitions and mergers in focus, and they’re predicted to continue over the coming year. While the integration strategy of firms coming together can differ case by case, deploying a unified, open-architecture, API-rich trading technology layer over acquired and existing solutions can help to provide a single way to face the market.
