Waters Rankings 2014: Best Broker-Dealer — UBS

Neo—naturally from the Greek neos, for “new”—began as a years-long effort to revamp the way UBS clients interface with the Swiss bank’s range of services. Designed with a combination of mostly HTML5 and some Apache Flex coding, the new portal was meant to transform the user experience and rationalize workflow in a comprehensive way that many firms of UBS’ size have trouble imagining, no less actually completing. To its credit, the bank has successfully done both—though because of some fortuitous timing, its agency offerings have done even more.

In at least two markets, the Neo project launched just at the right time. In the first, foreign exchange (FX), the platform has finally brought UBS’ digital offering up to speed with major global competitors like Deutsche Bank’s Autobahn and Barclays’ Barx systems, providing a range of new tools as well as electronic trading of complex FX options, which in the past could be traded only by voice.

Swaps, meanwhile, is where Neo has made its greatest and loudest impact, with the platform becoming broadly recognized in the industry as the first of its kind on the sell side to aggregate liquidity among swap execution facilities (SEFs). In doing so, it has attracted a growing cohort of buy-side clients unwilling to manage the connectivity and legal complications of the new swaps ecosystem on their own. A SEF aggregator was always great fodder for industry conversation during the past few years. With Neo, UBS brought the idea to fruition.

As Waters first reported in February, surging demand for alternative “swap future” products quickly led to streaming prices on Neo from Eris Exchange, functionality that was rapidly built and officially introduced this May.

Though surely not the last user-centric addition to the platform, this work is, on its own, a testament to the change in mindset that Neo has inspired—and with it, a new sell-side standard has now been set.