Sell-Side Technology Awards 2013: Best Sell-Side Web-based Development Environment ─ smartTrade

The reasons are obvious enough, given the maturing code base, browser adoption, and a consistent growth in interest regarding mobile device usage in financial services. There are development environments available in abundance for other sectors, but for the purposes of this award, smartTrade's HTML5 framework for its Liquidity Management System (LMS) product saw it top a highly competitive category to take home the award for the best sell-side web-based development environment for 2013.

The company's proposition is an interesting one ─ rather than restricting clients from developing HTML5-based user interfaces just for LMS or LiquidityFX, smartTrade's other key product, the framework is open and designed to integrate with any back-end trading engine. This enables, according to smartTrade, ease-of-use for cross-asset needs, where variant engines may be used from a unified front-end interface.

The company itself has been migrating to HTML5 over several years, taking everything from its monitoring tools through to trading workstations over to the new code, adding its own confidence to the future growth of the language. For sell-side institutions, the benefits are obvious when reduction of cost and effort for expensive development programs is always front and center.

Within the environment, users are able to add widgets to their interface according to specific needs, and given HTML5's ability to natively support what is essentially the full range of multimedia content such as video, audio, charts, equations and more, this can easily obviate the key differences between web and desktop programs, where advanced functionality would traditionally be confined to the former. As might be expected from an HTML5 environment, it also creates portability across mobile phones and tablets, originating from the single code base, without the need for duplicative, parallel development. The inclusion of a WebSockets application program interface (API) also allows for near-real-time streaming of market data to web applications, further enhancing the usability-and potential-of applications created in the environment.

The company's proposition is an interesting one ─ rather than restricting clients from developing HTML5-based user interfaces just for LMS or LiquidityFX, smartTrade's other key product, the framework is open and designed to integrate with any back-end trading engine.

SMARTTRADE REACTION

"smartTrade's team is very proud to be recognized in the web development space. smartTrade has developed an HTML5 development platform that enables clients to customize their user interfaces and can be deployed across multiple devices. We open the code base so that LMS clients will be able to completely customize their smartTrade front-ends by adding widgets to support their specific needs. Since the new HTML5 development platform is tightly integrated, the functionality of LMS can be extended beyond the desktop. We believe the front-end space is now very commoditized and there is no reason for users to pay high prices just to get a ‘front-end,' which should be a low-cost component of a solid back-end trading system. Therefore, our HTML5 development platform and user interfaces are offered at a fraction of the price charged by other vendors in the market."

David Vincent, CEO and CTO, smartTrade Technologies