Asia Awards 2024: Best transaction-cost analysis (TCA) solution—big xyt

Overview

Valuable and insightful pre- and post-trade transaction-cost analysis (TCA) must manage increasingly complex datasets at high levels of granularity. This is a challenge for most buy-side and sell-side firms. big xyt sources, stores and normalizes granular datasets across 120 global markets, including equities, exchange-traded funds, listed derivatives and FX. With Open TCA, users can interrogate those datasets to determine clients’ pre-trade costs, benchmark their trading when they execute, and calculate the cost when they do not.

The solution  

Open TCA is an analytics as-a-service offering from big xyt, built on a high-performance technology stack, and is accessible via web-based front-ends and APIs where derived data can be extracted by clients and additional analysis performed. The firm’s clients can perform their own analyses without the large overheads of in-house systems. Its underlying technology constantly evolves to ensure high performance across increasingly large and complex datasets.

Secret sauce  

A key differentiator for big xyt is that it is wholly owned by its founders and employees and it has no conflicting trading function. The firm’s domain expertise and methodology provide users with a variety of trading-related functions, from standard TCA reports to an API to facilitate machine-learning techniques, and apply them to their trading datasets. big xyt delivers analytics hosted in its own private cloud, which means there is no need for clients to subscribe to external cloud providers.

Recent milestones

• Integration of real-time analytics for a high-quality, consistent and normalized dataset of European trades and European Best Bid and Offer benchmark prices
• Trade verification tool allowing users to analyze any trade and big xyt’s analytics engine will return the verification of orderbook characteristics, price reversion and execution performance
• Trade explorer analytics solution for exchanges via big xyt ecosystems, the firm’s partnership with the Johannesburg Stock Exchange in Asia-Pacific, which included sponsoring three events in Japan, Australia and Singapore in 2023

Future objectives

• Ongoing enhancements to big xyt’s real-time analytics and pre-and post-trade analytics in line with new client demands/requirements
• Further expansion across Asia-Pacific with core functionality and the ability to customize these to meet clients’ needs in the region
• big xyt established a presence in Japan in late 2023 to develop and support that market, in addition to its presence across Asia-Pacific.

Why they won

big xyt follows up its win in the best data analytics provider/vendor category of the recent IMD & IRD Awards by emerging top in the best transaction-cost analysis (TCA) solution category of these awards, thanks to its Open TCA offering. Pre- and post-trade TCA―the analysis of the effectiveness of trading decisions and strategies and a key mechanism for institutional investors to evaluate broker “value”―is by no means a new phenomenon across the capital markets. 

What is new, however, is the new breed of analytics tools and data providing greater granularity into the all round “quality” of executions, and it is here where big xyt excels.  Founded in 2014, big xyt provides users with an analytics-as-a-service offering, allowing them to conduct the analysis they require in order to make the most judicious trading-related decisions. This is crucial for firms to manage accurately, efficiently, and transparently, which big xyt clearly understands and supports.