Fidessa has extended its equities platform to support exchange-traded derivatives, delivering connectivity to Euronext.liffe, EUREX, CBOT and CME.
Fidessa has extended its equities platform to support exchange-traded derivatives, delivering connectivity to Euronext.liffe, EUREX, CBOT and CME.
According to Fidessa, the platform provides ‘robust, super-resilient trading across asset classes along with smart order flow, integrated market data, risk management and connectivity to an extensive network of financial players across a global market’.
For the past 18 months, the Fidessa development team, led by Stephen Grob, head of derivatives, has worked to extend the core strengths of the equity platform and ensure that all enhancements support an asset agnostic architecture.
Grob said: ‘Unlike other vendors, we made the decision from the outset to extend and build upon our own architecture in order to end up with a truly integrated platform. This will pay real dividends in areas such as smart order routing and algorithmic trading whereby we can go across asset class and across exchange simultaneously."
Fidessa has traditionally specialised in cash equities and has built up a strong reputation for offering a highly resilient and robust platform which is now used by over 85% of global, tier-one equity brokers. Fidessa’s move into derivatives is timed to reflect a growing need within both the sell and buy sides for global multi-asset platforms that smaller, single-asset vendors do not have the resources to develop or, more importantly, operate and support.
With these new cross asset capabilities, the Fidessa platform enables its users to reduce trading costs, simplify infrastructure, improve order flow and offer a better range of services to their customers. The single platform approach also simplifies regulatory compliance with directives such as MiFID and Reg NMS, by reducing the number of disparate systems and data feeds that are impacted and making the demonstration of best execution easier, especially for structured products across asset classes.
Paul MacGregor, director of technology partnerships, Euronext.liffe, comments: ‘This move by Fidessa will help bring the cash and derivatives markets much closer together. We believe this will open up new distributions channels for us and will consequently attract new order flow across our markets in Amsterdam, Brussels, Lisbon, London and Paris.’
Grob said: ‘As a more recent entrant into the derivatives space we have had the luxury of being able to take a more considered view on functionality. We then validated this approach with our customers before moving into a full production environment. We have now laid the groundwork for firms to structure their businesses around the needs of their clients free from the technical limitations of individual trading platforms."
Fidessa will also be adding support for US equity options exchanges beginning with ISE and CBOE and will then be addressing energy and other commodity markets.
The Fidessa product suite provides integrated trading, market data and connectivity solutions to over 8500 users at 200 institutions worldwide. Fidessa’s connectivity network provides links to over 600 buy-side institutions, 140 brokers and 67 exchanges globally.
