Sell-Side Technology Awards 2016: Best Sell-Side OTC Trading Initiative — TradingScreen

Launched in 2008, TradingScreen's TradeExchange is a multi-trading model exchange platform that provides a fully-hosted connectivity solution for direct member access. It helps to aggregate fragmented liquidity with the aim of driving electronic trading via distributed channels, while also increasing the turnover of bonds.

TradeExchange offers single-point access to multiple trading models. The platform’s RFQ, RFS, crossing, and auction-trading models enable clients and dealers to interact with more structure and transparency. Co-mingled bilateral (named) and matched-principle (anonymous) trading provide access to a wider dealing community, minimizing information leakage and simultaneously maximizing matching opportunities, according to the New York-based company. Price and tenor tolerances let participants enter into structured negotiation chats designed to increase matching opportunities, while periodic inter-dealer auctions allow dealers to efficiently manage their balance sheets. TradeExchange provides support for agency ratings, real-time pricing, benchmark spreads, complex-event processing, and dealer-contributed streams through an Excel spreadsheet, portfolio order management systems, or an internal smart-order routing mechanism. It can be run on a software-as-a-service-based model or it can be internally deployed. 

TradingScreen’s Joseph Ahearn points to TradeExchange’s “unique workflow processing,” its variety of liquidity-location tools, and its “extensive breadth of messaging supported by the TradeExchange FIX API,” as the qualities that separate it from others in the space. Most recently, TradeExchange now ensures that the FIX API supports all of the messaging workflow available on the HTML5 user interface. Beyond TradeExchange, in December the Singapore Exchange (SGX) announced that it had successfully launched SGX Bond Pro, the first OTC trading venue dedicated to Asian Bonds, powered by TradingScreen’s Galaxy global fixed-income platform infrastructure. “The partnership with TradingScreen has offered SGX the opportunity to offer a world-class trading venue in record time,” said Muthukrishnan Ramaswami, the president of SGX, in a statement.

In April 2015, TradingScreen announced the launch of its Market Surveillance Tool, designed to monitor a wide range of market-abuse scenarios in all asset classes, especially listed derivatives. And in July, it and 15 of Europe’s largest long-only asset managers collaborated on TradeCross, a buy side-focused crossing platform for fixed-income corporate bonds. “The TradeCross initiative is unique as it is built with scalability and the needs of the buy side in mind,” Brett Chappell, head of fixed-income trading at Nordea Investment Management, told Waters at the time. 

TradeExchange offers single-point access to multiple trading models. The platform’s RFQ, RFS, crossing, and auction-trading models enable clients and dealers to interact with more structure and transparency.