Buy-Side Technology Awards: Best Buy-Side Execution Venue—Liquidnet

It seems as though new alternative execution venues are sprouting up on a weekly basis across the globe. Still, Liquidnet has managed to maintain its premier position in this space, even in the face of an increasingly competitive marketplace. Over the last 18 months, Liquidnet has boosted its already impressive client roster by about 25 percent—it has a presence in 39 countries with about 630 participants that manage assets worth more than $12 trillion. According to a Thomson Reuters Marketshare report, the average execution size in Liquidnet’s global negotiated pool is about 100 times larger than any other venue—lit or dark. Liquidnet has also seen an uptick of 30 percent for total international principal traded.

The most significant advance made by Liquidnet over the last year is its partnership with SIX Swiss Exchange, where SIX Swiss members can tap into Liquidnet’s global liquidity pool to execute large block trades. The company’s CEO, Seth Merrin, told Waters earlier this year that he expects more similar partnerships in the future.

Liquidnet began an impressive global network upgrade earlier this year in order to reduce latency from Asia. It is also starting to split off some of its niche specialties to create “as-a-service” offerings for reference data, tick data, and it has additional ideas for its data warehousing space, Liquidnet CIO Neal Goldstein told Waters.

Liquidnet has also begun to enhance its streaming liquidity gateway to cut order-acknowledgement latency to hundreds of microseconds, and it is looking at ways to expose its data in real-world situations. For example, Liquidnet has begun to give its sales and relationship managers “actionable data,” both historical and real-time, that will alert the individual to contact a client if there is a problem or if a deadline is approaching.

“I don’t think that there will ever be a time when there isn’t some sort of enterprise-wide data program being built in this company; there are always areas where we can improve,” Goldstein told Waters.

Additionally, at this year’s Waters Rankings, Liquidnet was voted as the best crossing network provider, beating Goldman Sachs, ITG and NYSE Technologies. —AM