Sell-Side Technology Awards 2020: Best Swap Execution Facility—Tradeweb Markets

Mark it six in a row for Tradeweb Markets in the swap execution facility (SEF) category. While the company’s dominance in this category hasn’t changed, the world in which it operates has. The coronavirus pandemic has required more customers to work from home or remotely, and conduct work more electronically and efficiently—a theme that the company has been working on for some time.

Tradeweb has been focused on making continual improvements to trading workflows, adding digital shortcuts, integrating critical regulatory functions, and creating entirely new automated trading technologies—and all of this was going on before Covid-19 roiled the markets. As a result, Tradeweb has enjoyed record growth in interest rate derivatives trading on its platform. In 2019, an average of $212.5 billion in rates derivatives was traded every day on Tradeweb, a 66% jump from 2018. Additionally, Tradeweb’s TW SEF is currently the largest SEF for vanilla swaps, with over 22 trillion traded in 2019, or 42% of industry-wide SEF volume, based on data from Clarus FT.

Most recently, Tradeweb has seen consistent growth in multi-asset packages (MAP) trading, which clients use to achieve more competitive pricing, reduce manual booking errors, and increase execution speed for package trades. Users have also been using list trading to facilitate migrating their portfolios from Libor to risk-free benchmarks, as well as trading across multiple central counterparties (CCPs) and managing basis risk. On the collaboration front, Tradeweb has continued its work with Cassini Systems and OpenGamma to help clients access lifecycle cost analytics, minimize trading costs, and prove best execution. And, of course, the company has continued to grow its footprint, adding currencies like the Czech Koruna, Hungarian Forint, and Mexican Peso.

While the pandemic is still unfolding, for the rest of 2020 and beyond, Tradeweb is continuing to build functionality to support the market through this year’s Libor transition toward alternatives like Sonia, €str, and Sofr.