Asia Awards 2025: Best outsourcing provider—Northern Trust

Overview

Northern Trust’s outsourced trading capability combines worldwide trading expertise in equities and fixed income, exchange-traded derivatives (not currently available in APAC) and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) across global markets. It provides coverage from multiple trading locations, access to high-quality liquidity and a fully integrated middle- and back-office service. The Integrated Trading Solutions (ITS) platform helps asset owners and asset managers to lower costs, reduce risk, manage regulatory compliance, and enhance transparency and operational efficiency.

The solution  

Northern Trust’s ITS assumes the cost and complexity of trading-related activities, delivering these as a service on a variable cost basis, allowing firms to operate in a capital-lite, agile and focused manner. ITS provides straight-through processing (STP) architecture that integrates data flows through front-, middle- and back-office systems to support the settlement cycle, reducing the need for manual intervention and creating operational efficiencies.

Secret sauce  

Today, asset managers are looking to outsource the entire trade lifecycle, including execution, trade matching and settlement, commission management and transaction-cost analysis (TCA), all of which can be delivered through the ITS platform. Northern Trust’s trading clients can also access FX services through Complete FX, which automatically executes FX transactions at a time designated by the client.

Recent milestones

On September 12, 2024, Northern Trust launched its Integrated Trading Solutions fixed-income outsourced trading capability in Asia-Pacific through Northern Trust Securities in Australia and its brokerage business, offering outsourced trading capabilities to the Asia-Pacific fixed-income market, to meet the needs of asset owners and managers serving investors in the region. With this addition, Northern Trust now offers 24/6 fixed-income trading coverage with desks in Chicago, London and Sydney.

Future objectives

• Northern Trust will continue to expand its multi-asset trading capabilities to meet client demand. Equity outsourcing has been popular among managers for some time now, while the firm has seen a growing demand for its fixed-income outsourcing offering in recent months.
• Northern Trust launched a fixed-income trading desk in Asia-Pacific in late 2024 to provide 24/6 global coverage across asset classes and continues to add counterparties to its multi-source liquidity network.

Why they won

Northern Trust follows up its win in this category in last year’s WatersTchnology Asia Awards by winning it again and underlining its position as one of the go-to names across the capital markets when it comes to managed services and outsourcing. The Chicago-based firm’s success is thanks to its outstanding ITS platform that supports trading functions and access to high-quality liquidity across equities, fixed income, exchange-traded derivatives and exchange-traded funds, while also offering integrated middle- and back-office services to buy-side firms looking to improve their operational efficiency while minimizing their technology footprint. 

At a time when buy-side firms (and their end-investors) are scrutinizing the bottom line and their various operating costs, the option of partnering with a firm like Northern Trust is certainly compelling, leaving investment managers to focus on their core competencies of making the most judicious, transparent and repeatable business and investment decisions.