Front-office trading technology is vital to fixed-income trading desks, where sourcing liquidity, analyzing intraday pricing feeds, and vetting different protocols can be overwhelming to bond traders.
At the ICE Strategic Partners Alliances Forum held at the New York Stock Exchange in December, panelists discussed ways to bring greater efficiency to bond trading in the credit and municipal bond markets – themes that will reverberate throughout 2025. Panelists from FlexTrade Systems, a provider of order-and execution-management systems for buy-and sell-side firms, Investortools, a fixed-income software provider for investment managers, and Trumid, an electronic corporate bond trading platform, discussed a broad range of topics moderated by Pierce Lord, Senior Director, Pricing, ICE.
While the catalyst in the front-office technology has been electronification of the credit space, the focus of venues and order and execution management systems (OEMSs) has shifted to how to increase workflow efficiency.
The Evolving Role of Front-Office Trading Technology
Venky Vemparala, SVP and Global Product Manager – Fixed Income, FlexTrade Systems, said fixed income as an asset class has been a focus of the firm’s execution management system, FlexFI. While a fixed-income EMS should provide connectivity to all destinations, all liquidity sources and algorithms, Vemparala said this has become table stakes. “Our differentiation is really on how we improve workflow efficiency in the context of an EMS using connectivity and data as a building block.”
As for what makes their platforms unique, Jason Quinn, Chief Product Officer and Global Head of Sales at Trumid, said: “It’s liquidity, it’s access to workflows and trading protocols that help them [traders] do their jobs better, and a connected and engaged client network.”
When Trumid first jumped into the credit market a decade ago, it was difficult for a new electronic trading platform to break into corporate credit, said Quinn. The platform had a unique protocol known as “Swarms,” to concentrate liquidity in a specific security or list of securities, bringing users together at a particular point in time to trade anonymously and electronically. Since then, it has built out a full ecosystem of trading protocols in one place, including: Trumid Request-For-Quote or RFQ, Trumid Auto-Pilot for RFQ, Attributed Trading, Portfolio Trading (PT) and Swarms.
Read the full article on FlexTrade.com