Asia Awards 2025: Best middle-office platform—OSTTRA

Overview

OSTTRA MarkitWire is an electronic platform developed to process over-the-counter (OTC) derivative trades, while simultaneously optimizing straight-through processing (STP) and reducing operational risk. OSTTRA’s legal confirmation is a critical key to the platform, providing a golden source of agreed electronic derivative contract information to market counterparties, and creating a point of agreement and standardization that ensures trust between all counterparties. Using this record in downstream T+1 activities lowers the resource burden and operational complexity for operations teams managing increasing trade volumes. Beyond the matching process, MarkitWire also helps firms connect to industry clearinghouses, regulatory reporting repositories, and settlement partners.

The solution  

OSTTRA MarkitWire provides capital markets firms on both sides of the industry with a standardized, legally robust trade confirmation platform that automates post-trade processes efficiently while reducing operational risk. It ensures regulatory compliance via transparency and audit trails, regulatory reporting, clearing connectivity, and supports market reforms like benchmark transitions. With T+0 and T+1 operational alignment, confirmed trades are viewable directly in OSTTRA triResolve, the firm’s portfolio reconciliation service. This integration promotes data standardization for reconciliation, yielding improved efficiency, cost reduction, and greater counterparty transparency.

Secret sauce  

OSTTRA’s network comprises some 1,600 counterparties and 12 central clearing counterparties (CCPs) and supports 10 regulatory regimes. In 2024, it processed $1.25 quadrillion new notional across a range of asset classes for participants, including over 260 dealers, 65 inter-dealer brokers and 13,000 active legal entities. Initially developed and launched in 2003, OSTTRA MarkitWire is used by investment managers, hedge funds, dealers, inter-dealer brokers and trading venues with 40 new entities joining the network in 2024.

Recent milestones

• Processed $1.25 quadrillion in notional volume (during 2024) and onboarded over 40 new entities
• Supported 150,000 Mexican TIIE transition, 300,000 Canadian CDOR transition and 19,000 Israeli Telbor contracts
• Expanded CCP connectivity and multi-regime compliance

Future objectives

• Facilitate upcoming benchmark reforms across global markets
• Enhance T+1 alignment with triResolve for faster reconciliations
• Broaden asset class coverage and regulatory support

Why they won

OSTTRA wins the best middle-office platform category in this year’s WatersTchnology Asia Awards by virtue of its ever-popular OSTTRA MarkitWire electronic platform developed to process OTC derivative trades, while simultaneously enhancing automation levels and reducing operational risk for user-firms. Any platform that adds transparency and operational and regulatory robustness to the global OTC derivatives market and the processing of trades will ultimately be embraced by market participants, a notion underlined by the addition of 40 new entities to the platform over the last year. 

The sheer number of dealers, inter-dealer brokers and other users is all the proof anyone needs that OSTTRA MarkitWire is addressing very real, day-to-day challenges faced by OTC derivatives market participants. The platform ensures regulatory compliance via transparency and audit trails, regulatory reporting, clearing connectivity, and supports market reforms like benchmark transitions, while confirmed trades are viewable directly in OSTTRA triResolve, the firm’s portfolio reconciliation service.