Buy-Side Technology Awards 2016: Best Buy-Side Execution Venue—Liquidnet

Its success in these awards, however, is fully justified. Liquidnet has shown a relentless streak when it comes to new and innovative products, preserving its leading position by satisfying the buy side’s steadily increasing requirements in the face of a constantly shifting trading environment.

In October last year, the execution venue launched its first fixed-income dark pool, creating a new liquidity hub, allowing more than 200 market players to trade large blocks of fixed-income securities. During 2016, Liquidnet’s client base steadily swelled and by the end of the year it will have on-boarded a further 20 customers. 

In July, the New York-based trading network also launched its targeted invitations tool, which enables buy-side traders to become their own sales traders. With this service, they can search for liquidity by using Liquidnet’s electronic footprints to message other members that have had similar positions in the past.

The Next Gen Algos suite, another new product introduced during the course of the year, is designed to enhance the trading performance of its buy-side users with precision tools built to address the complexities of institutional trading. It has been engineered to address three key needs: seeking large-in-scale liquidity, outperforming benchmarks, and trading portfolios. Liquidnet’s dark aggregator also gained significant attention from the buy side over the past 12 months.

Originally launched in 2012, the algorithm now represents one-third of the vendor’s overall business revenues, a figure that has tripled over the last year.

Liquidnet has shown a relentless streak when it comes to new and innovative products, preserving its leading position by satisfying the buy side’s steadily increasing requirements in the face of a constantly shifting trading environment.

It seems Liquidnet has no intention of ceasing its innovation-driven operations. In fact, it is currently looking into how it can link its targeted invitations service to its algorithms in order to provide better buy-side services amid regulatory uncertainty and change. “A lot of our thinking is around what Mifid II means,” says Mark Pumfrey, Liquidnet’s head of EMEA. “We try to come up with solutions as to how we’ll adjust our platform to cater for the change in responsibility from a best execution and a volume cap perspective.”