SST Awards 2018: Best Sell-Side Mobile Initiative—Saxo Bank

The bank’s HTML5-based trading platform, SaxoTraderGo, was launched in 2015 and is available on mobiles, tablets and laptops. It offers access to over 30,000 tradable instruments, as well as a wide range of risk management tools and ancillary features. “You can access 5,000 different bonds globally that more or less address the market in the same manner, and that is new,” says Simon Fasdal, head of fixed income at Saxo Bank. “So you more or less have the same technology to provide a client experience that is similar, despite the fact that the markets are very different.” 

Trading technology is developing fast and the markets are changing rapidly, leading to many traditional bank models being challenged, according to Fasdal. “We have 110 partner banks and brokers throughout the globe and many think that this is a nice solution and will be a part of their offering soon,” he says. “The first big names are already on it.”  

Fasdal has worked in the fixed-income markets for 20 years and says that this is the first time he has seen retail clients able to access the market in exactly the same manner as a large pension fund. “Now you can do it on your mobile, on your holidays or wherever you are, and you can access and trade your bonds just as you have done with equities for quite a while,” Fasdal says. 

Trading a French government bond is different to trading an emerging market bond, although SaxoTraderGo provides a client experience that is similar, despite the fact that the markets behave differently. According to Fasdal, it won’t be long before certain traditional dealer functions will be assumed by robotics. “The robot will survey the market and whenever a buyer or seller comes up in a specific bond that the client has requested, it will counter that data or offer with a price at a certain level,” he says.