Sell-Side Technology Awards 2025: Best infrastructure provider to the sell side—TransFICC

Overview

TransFICC provides low-latency connectivity and automated trading workflows for the global fixed-income market, which is highly fragmented with over 200 execution venues globally, each with its own API for electronic trading. Technology must be low-latency as these venues can update prices more than 5,000 times per second in volatile markets. With numerous complex workflows for different assets, manual trading is still a sizable part of the market, which is inefficient, limits growth, and is subject to errors.

The solution  

TransFICC’s One API translates venue APIs to its own single API. Clients connect once to TransFICC’s API to trade on multiple venues, saving thousands of hours of coding, testing and managing system upgrades. TransFICC provides fast, secure and scalable technology so that institutions can keep pace with price updates and not get beaten to best price. It also automates trading workflows for clients to increase efficiency and capacity. Trading firms benefit from streamlined technology and reduced operational costs.

Secret sauce  

Within fixed income, complex trading workflows exist for multiple different asset types. TransFICC can normalize even the most complex datasets and workflows, increasing automation and enabling increased efficiency and scale, while simultaneously reducing costs. All software is developed in-house, while the firm’s purpose-built platform provides high performance and reliability to satisfy banks’ and regulators’ demands. This includes using open-source technologies like Simple Binary Encoding (SBE) to support fast encoding and decoding, and Aeron to support fast and reliable messaging. TransFICC even manages its own points of presence (PoPs) at datacenters, increasing control of all aspects of its technology.

Recent milestones

• Credit e-trading launched: This is an end-to-end platform, providing a user interface for data analysis, trading, and post-trade. This plug-and-play service supports all credit workflows, provides full security and disaster recovery, and is quick to deploy.
• TransACT (automated client trading) launched: This automates request-for-quote (RFQ) negotiation workflows for banks, trading on credit dealer-to-client venues, helping them to price smaller trades without manual intervention. TransACT is already in production at a global dealer.
• The One API service automated more than 51 new trading and post-trade workflows across 20 venues.
• TransFICC also launched the FIX multiplexer, enabling easier migration to TransFICC and interoperability with legacy systems by supporting multiple FIX endpoints for the same trading venue.

Future objectives

• TransFICC is building additional automated workflow services for the sell side to automatically price fixed-income securities across all the major venues.
• It will add more datacenter connectivity, including DC3 (Chicago), SG1 (Singapore) and IT3 (Bergamo, Italy).

Why they won

TransFICC repeats its success from 12 months ago by winning the category for the best infrastructure provider to the sell side again this year, thanks to its outstanding fixed-income trading infrastructure. Any product or service that simplifies users’ lives is bound to gain the industry’s support and TransFICC is an outstanding example of that. One need look no further than its TransFICC One API for proof: It provides connectivity to large numbers of fixed-income trading venues, but instead of requiring clients to manage the interfaces to each of the venues they connect with themselves, TransFICC shoulders that considerable burden by providing them with a single interface and allowing them to focus on their primary trading responsibilities. A quick glance down the list of TransFICC’s recent milestones illustrates just how busy the London-based e-trading tech firm has been in recent months. Clearly, Steve Toland and his colleagues haven’t been resting on their laurels.           

Last year’s category write-up predicted that we were likely to “hear a lot more from TransFICC in the months and years ahead.” And indeed we have. Congratulations to TransFICC for its second success on the bounce and another outstanding entry to these awards.