Sell-Side Technology Awards 2016: Best Sell-Side Front-Office Execution Platform — Fidessa

The London-based vendor repeats its success in this year's SST Awards in what is always a fiercely competitive category, thanks to a number of initiatives to expand its electronic execution platform and a series of key clients wins in the Asia-Pacific region.

A firm with Fidessa’s experience of providing trading systems to the sell side for over 30 years cannot rest on its laurels, and, given the level of activity over the last 12 months, it’s clear that Fidessa is on top of its game. The firm’s electronic execution platform provides access to 215 markets globally and supports trading across multiple asset classes, allowing users to outsource the commoditized aspects of execution—those that do not provide firms with a competitive advantage such as exchange interfaces and connectivity—and focus on those responsible for determining effectiveness and performance such as smart order routing and smart crossing in order to facilitate higher fill rates. 

Fidessa spent much of the last year expanding the integrated tools available through the platform as part of its Optimized Trading Initiative, which began in June with the release of the Order Analytics service, designed to offer traders improved transparency, monitoring and progress measurement of algorithms. Then, just a month later, it added a new Order Performance Monitor (OPM) tool to the platform, allowing traders to monitor order flows and identify outliers in real time, in response to an increasing focus on execution practices from the buy side, ultimately designed to displace traditional transaction-cost analysis (TCA) tools. The OPM element sits within the order flow of the trading platform to provide traders with real-time views of orders, underpinned by a proprietary scoring methodology specifically designed to identify outlying trades that are not performing as expected.

This was followed in September with the release of Market Analytics, providing traders with detailed market micro-structure analysis and the ability to drill down and understand why orders are trading the way they are, and what factors might be influencing them. 

Alongside these improvements, Fidessa made significant gains in the Asian markets, capitalizing on a boom of so-called “regional super-brokers” where domestic players expand to provide a focused regional service with local knowledge to satisfy both regional investors and the international community. In this respect, Fidessa signed 10 mainland Chinese brokers as clients, as well as three Malaysian banks, including RHB Investments Bank and Maybank.

A firm with Fidessa’s experience of providing trading systems to the sell side for over 30 years cannot rest on its laurels, and, given the level of activity over the last 12 months, it’s clear that Fidessa is on top of its game.