WatersTechnology Asia Awards 2020: Best Transaction-Cost Analysis Solution—Tradeweb Markets

Tradeweb wins the best transaction-cost analysis (TCA) solution category in the inaugural WatersTechnology Asia Awards. Founded in 1996, Tradeweb focuses on the US treasuries market and is now one of the largest institutional trading platforms in the industry with a presence in 40 markets, with 2,500 institutional clients across 65 countries.

The company uses composite pricing to generate accurate and reliable pre-trade information on how each market is performing. Paul Worthy, head of Japan at Tradeweb, describes how the platform “gives us incredibly strong market data, which is the real foundation of being able to benchmark how your trade will be executed.”

Tradeweb’s global market base has enabled it to acquire large data volumes, which helps fuel the platform and allows for benchmarking against any product and peer analysis due to the volumes of transaction data stored within it. Worthy notes how the firm’s detailed and robust pricing “underpins our ability to help clients benchmark the cost-effectiveness of the trades they are doing. They can evaluate their transaction costs, the market impact of their trades, their performance against a reliable benchmark and, for asset managers, how they’re dealing with their institutional mandates and best execution requirements,” he says.

In an industry focused on measuring the effectiveness and profitability of executions, using real-time data and real-time pricing information are key to Tradeweb’s continued success. “If you think about measuring the effectiveness of your trading and your performance, that’s actually quite a hard thing to do,” Worthy explains. “But we can reference where someone trades versus where the market midpoint is during that time and provide an objective dollar figure of what that means for the client.”

Clients’ ability to monitor their best execution obligations and analyze the data emanating from them is an area they find invaluable and, with a growing global focus on compliance and regulation, it is ultimately necessary. Worthy notes that one of the more interesting trends the firm is now seeing is the extent to which TCA is becoming more integrated with trading functions, allowing firms to run TCA post-trade, and in some instances, pre-trade too. “As we’re starting to see more automated trading, this fits really nicely with the analysis side that you get from TCA,” he says.

As Tradeweb’s offerings continue to grow, the firm is, in turn, continuing to expand its solutions to meet the growing needs of its clients.