Sell-Side Technology Awards 2023: Best sell-side middle-office platform—Orchestrade

Overview

Large numbers of banks rely on an amalgamation of different systems to manage their risk and middle-office functions. This reliance on legacy systems makes it challenging for them to respond to market needs and implement new initiatives. Greater efficacy and risk management processes are difficult to achieve with siloed technology. Orchestrade is a trading, operations, and risk management platform that is natively cross-asset, business agnostic, and can be adapted at the pace of the market. It features adaptive workflows providing reconciliation, P&L monitoring, product control reporting, trade exception management, trade lifecycle management, and collateral management.

The solution

Along with risk management capabilities, Orchestrade provides real-time P&L and risk tools across all asset classes, exception management and fixing. It covers complex asset classes and the ability to add new ones. The system is designed to enable rapid deployment, with a short time to value.

• Lower running costs: Consolidating multiple systems into one platform that carries low-cost upgrades
• Scalable and extensible: Open C# API allows users access to the same interfaces that Orchestrade’s developers use to code functionality

Secret sauce

Orchestrade is a scalable solution built on the latest technologies. It is cross-asset by design and not a multi-asset platform that has been expanded and bolted together from different technology stacks and data modules. It offers a range of out-of-the-box capabilities with a business process library, risk, middle-office tools, and functionality with a range of workflow configurations. It has a collection of market-standard APIs, all of which enable rapid deployment.

Recent enhancements

In December, the firm released Orchestrade Version 8, which features over 1,000 enhancements. The specific enhancements include:

• Cumulative P&L: Now captures cross effects between dependent market data types (e.g., interest and volatility, interest and credit, etc.) to reduce unexplained P&L
• Intraday P&L: Now supported and includes individual trade P&L contributions from start of day through to end of day
• Compliance module: Updated with alert workflow management. Further enhancements include additional bucketing, limit monitoring on risk scenarios, new functions for custom formulas, and improved UX.

Future objectives

• Orchestrade will have one major and one minor release in the next year.
• It will continue to meet the needs of both conventional sell-side firms and the needs of crypto, neobanks and retail brokers.
• It will continue to work on improvements around the Isda Standard Initial Margin Model and extending its reconciliation flexibility.

Why they won

Orchestrade wins its first ever WatersTechnology award by taking home the perennially competitive sell-side middle-office platform category thanks to its eponymous offering. The Orchestrade platform features trading, operations, and risk management functionality designed from the outset to be asset class- and business function-agnostic. It features adaptive workflows providing reconciliation, P&L monitoring, product control reporting, trade exception management, trade lifecycle management, and collateral management. It will be interesting to see whether Orchestrade is able to follow up this success by winning a category in the Waters Rankings or Buy-Side Technology Awards later in the year.