Fidessa Group launches intelligent liquidity access strategy in Europe

According to Fidessa, the strategy recognises the impact of increasing liquidity fragmentation in the post-Mifid landscape between a range of new venues, multilateral trading facilities, alternative trading systems and dark pools, each of which offers a different way for businesses to execute orders in conjunction with more established markets. At the same time, firms are looking to enrich and manage their order flow in increasingly sophisticated ways.

For the buy-side, the strategy allows users of Fidessa LatentZero’s Minerva order and execution management system to be more involved in and take greater control of the trading process.

Additionally, through the managed LatentZero Trading Network service, which is integrated with Fidessa’s own global connectivity network, these buy-side firms can access the direct market access, care, programme and algorithmic trading services of more than 255 brokers and access more than 100 liquidity venues around the world.

For the sell-side, Fidessa’s multi-asset trading platform comes with a complete suite of tools to enable intelligent trading in the post-Mifid landscape, encompassing DMA, advanced trading tools including BlueBox, Fidessa’s fully integrated algorithmic trading engine, smart order routing, best execution and data compliance, as well as direct connectivity through to pools of global liquidity.

In addition to accessing traditional displayed liquidity, Fidessa’s smart order routing capabilities allow brokers to access their own internalised liquidity and the liquidity held in dark pools, thus providing best execution.

As part of its intelligent liquidity access strategy, Fidessa has developed new partnerships with emerging trading venues including Nyfix Euro Millennium, which was launched in March, Börse Berlin Equiduct Trading and Turquoise, and with trade reporting platform Markit Boat.

‘Anticipating market changes under Mifid, we have been working hard to understand the key issues and their impact on our users,’ says Steve Grob, director of strategic partnerships at Fidessa. ‘We believe we can now provide all market participants with an unrivalled choice of liquidity venues supported by a range of discovery tools. We welcome new execution venues to our connectivity network, which we expect to benefit from our extensive user base.’

Artur Fischer, joint chief executive of Börse Berlin Equiduct Trading, says: ‘Having just launched the VBBO as the first step for our new market segment, Equiduct Trading, our goal is to help trading institutions trade efficiently across borders and deliver best execution in the pan-European market. By linking to Fidessa, we can directly access an extensive community of firms that will be able to benefit from our exchange.’

Paul Kelly, director of Nyfix International, says: ‘We are the first dark pool in Europe to successfully integrate with Fidessa, empowering the Fidessa client base to leverage seamlessly the full functionality available within Euro Millennium. We have worked very closely with the Fidessa team to ensure that our unique order types are accessed directly through Fidessa’s different front-end offerings.’

Adds Grob: ‘Central to this strategy is a delivery model whereby the cost and technical friction of routing flow through Fidessa to these venues is dramatically reduced In some cases this can be reduced to zero.’

‘Our commitment to bringing the opportunities available in the new trading landscape to our customers extends to the provision of greater choice of venues on which to report trades. In line with this aim, our partnership with Markit Boat provides users of our hosted platform with easy and cost-effective access to its trade reporting platform.’

Integral to its liquidity strategy is Fidessa’s ability to allow brokers to intelligently split their DMA flows across multiple venues, depending on specified criteria. ‘Key to our offering is that Fidessa has developed a range of ‘smart’ order management modules that enable the benefits of trading over multiple venues to be realised all the way through to the bottom line,’ says head of liquidity solutions Ian Salmon.

Fidessa group is a supplier of multi-asset trading, portfolio analysis, decision support, investment compliance, market data and global connectivity solutions for both buy-side and sell-side. Headquartered in London with offices in New York, Boston, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Paris and Toronto, the group serves some 22,000 users at 520 clients worldwide. Fidessa was founded in 1981, has revenues of USD270m and employs more than 1,100 people.