AFTAs 2016: Best Cross-Asset Trading Initiative—UBS Neo

The award has been on offer on nine previous occasions and the recipients are all recognizable names: JPMorgan (twice), Morgan Stanley (twice), Barclays, HSBC, RBS, State Street and Bank of America Merrill Lynch have all been in this category's winners' circle. Well, you can add one more prominent name to that list: UBS, thanks to its UBS Neo offering.

Neo provides UBS clients with a single point of access to all of UBS’ products and services, from content insights to pre-trade, trade and post-trade services. Regulatory changes have helped to drive development for the team, but with the Mifid II deadline looming a little under a year away, banks and clients will need to better understand how they are interacting electronically. And, as always, access to aggregated market liquidity and the ability to execute trades seamlessly and reliably will be vital.

Neo serves as the Swiss bank’s central content hub, which includes research, sales and trading commentary, as well as market data. It also has pre-trade analytics, while the user workflow allows traders to move from trade decision making to actual trade execution to any post-trade activity with a single login and without having to switch tools.

Neo is connected to the core trading services of the bank. As a result, trades executed on the UBS Neo platform—via API, voice or any other channel—are displayed on UBS Neo. Because of that, order execution and expiry alerts, trade reporting, post-trade allocation and transaction-cost analysis (TCA) can all be conducted through the platform. UBS Neo’s reporting suite—which, again, will become ever more important thanks to Mifid II—includes trade valuation, margin reporting, risk reporting, and TCA functions.

In 2016, UBS invested heavily in leveraging modern web-based technologies in order to provide a fast, secure and reliable platform. It has also enhanced its monitoring and tracking tools to help proactively manage the growing technology footprint across the UBS group. And it has looked to new, open-source technologies in order to expand its capabilities. This year the group will look to expand Neo along with the bank’s wealth management and asset management teams in the Americas. 

Neo provides UBS clients with a single point of access to all of UBS’ products and services, from content insights to pre-trade, trade and post-trade services.

At this year’s Waters Rankings, UBS won the best broker-dealer platform thanks to Neo, making it three years in a row that the Swiss bank has taken home the award.