IMD & IRD Awards 2022: Best market data provider (broker)—Fenics Market Data

OVERVIEW

Fenics Market Data (FMD) is the exclusive distributor of data for global brokerage firm BGC Partners (BGCP) and its associated brands. Alongside its base of traditional indicative and trading datasets, FMD regularly releases new products and solutions to provide additional intelligence and metadata to its clients. Its Fenics Labs division is central to much of this product development by applying machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to FMD’s pools of organic data. In 2021, FMD launched a new product line through its data-as-a-solution (DaaS) offering, Level 2 Insights (L2i). It also made a number of updates to existing products and packages. 

THE SOLUTION

FMD’s new L2i solution normalizes, centralizes and aggregates all order and trade flows across BGCP’s over 400 liquidity pools, creating multi-asset class and instrument-specific consolidated pools of trading data. The inclusion of order book as well as trading data is a key differentiator. The number of orders is many multiples of actual trades and the addition of this data makes a huge amount of unseen market information available to clients.  

A diverse range of asset classes are captured on L2i including fixed income, FX and interest rates as well as equity and commodity derivatives. Instruments range from bonds and swaps to highly complex derivatives such as swaptions, barriers and cliquets. Many of these instruments fall outside Mifid and other regulatory reporting regimes, so their inclusion provides a unique lens into the OTC markets. Other product developments include the release of an enhanced FX Options package, which brings together the data of BGCP’s global interdealer brokerage and the capabilities of its FX Options analytical platform, kACE, to provide greater depth in tenors and strategies, as well as expanding to over 350 currency and precious metals pairs.

WHAT’S TO COME

Continued expansion lies ahead for FMD, with ongoing investment in headcount. The firm is also seeking to build out its distribution network, with further enhancement to direct feeds, a focus on vendor relationships, and the development of new channels such as cloud-based services. FMD will continue the expansion of L2i instrument and asset class coverage to cover the entire suite of brokered instruments, which means every trade signal throughout the BGC Group of companies will be captured. It will also be investing in Fenics US Treasuries, specifically in the corresponding provenance data service to provide clients with a window into the lifecycle of trading US treasuries and assisting them with pre- and post-trade operations.

WHY THEY WON

Fenics Market Data follows up last year’s win in the best market data newcomer category by winning this year’s best data provider (broker) category, thanks largely to its L2i offering. Not only does it normalize, centralize and aggregate all order and trade flows across BGC Partners’ over 400 liquidity pools, but in doing so it creates multi-asset class and instrument-specific consolidated pools of trading data. FMD has also significantly expanded the depth and breadth of its market data coverage, helping its clients with price discovery, especially when markets are volatile.