News

New report from GreySpark highlights the structural shift taking place in corporate and government bond trading.

FinTech is HOT in Asia - Steve and Tom have just returned from two exhausting days at the Echelon Asia Summit.

TransFICC has been selected to join The FinLab's accelerator programme. The FinLab is a joint venture between UOB and SGInnovate.

This week a piece in Markets Media stood out - mainly because it validates our business model. AxeTrading has received an investment of €2m, and Algomi and AllianceBernstein announced they will launch a bond market aggregator. This illustrates the demand for technology that helps navigate the fragmented bond market.

Views from last week's Fixed Income Leaders Summit in Boston. Two full days talking about the key themes in Fixed Income - Fragmentation, Regulation, Transparency and e-Trading.

A very interesting piece by Shanny Basar at Markets Media points to the expected growth of all-to-all corporate bond trading, the increasing number of venues offering all-to-all, how market data is exploding, and the role of technology in connecting these markets. It's got it all.

Bondecosystem and TransFICC are collaborating to provide Fixed Income traders with low latency connectivity to etrading venues. The partnership delivers point of presence in key Equinix datacentres and TransFICC's API, which supports fast, robust and scalable data throughput.

When markets were more manual and intermediated by people, the flow of information was limited to human networks. Electronic markets, coupled with increased market fragmentation, have multiplied the volume of market data exponentially.

Two articles caught our eye over the last week, which highlight how the Fixed Income market continues to evolve. An article in The Economist highlighted the growth of all-to-all e-trading in corporate bonds and Markets Media published a comment piece about the growth of Market Data in APAC.

Sobia Hamid at The Desk reports that the increase in Fixed Income e-trading is driving the growth of secure connectivity channels.

Corporate Bonds - Under MiFID II there will still be phone calls, but the calls will end when it comes to market-making. If a trade is deemed Large in Size or Size Specific to Instrument Thresholds, clients will hear, "Meet me on a venue".

IPC and TransFICC are now collaborating to provide over 6,000 market participants in IPC’s Fixed Income Marketplace with secure access to the production and UAT environments of TransFICC's high performance API.

"...the financial industry is going through a generational change in market structure due to deleveraging, regulation and zero tolerance of compliance failures." - Markets Media interviews Mark Beeston, from Illuminate Financial Management.

Steve is pitching TransFICC again....this time to the FinTech Shark Tank in Boston

Yesterday, Steve attended a busy EMEA FIX Trading Conference. Unsurprisingly, discussions were dominated by MiFID II, with most panels highlighting how the structure of Fixed Income and Derivatives markets will change as a response to regulation.

Thomas Thees from CastleOak Securities speaks with Larry Tabb - We have now reached the point where technology supports both the sell- and buy-side being price makers. Thees discusses the emergence of all-to-all marketplaces, the trader’s responsibility to achieve best execution, and the value of data.

"The recent proliferation of electronic trading platforms has created a set of challenges for market participants...These challenges highlight the importance of addressing connectivity...in order to provide access to appropriate platforms and counterparties, as well as to allow aggregation and search functions..."

More on MiFID II and transparency. We expect to see more OTC trading moving to regulated electronic venues, as these venues are obliged to meet the transparency requirements.

Tom's blog has been getting a lot of attention over the past month, due to a client sharing the Micro Benchmark Testing results - particularly the mean latency of 0.56 microseconds (stack object pooling using deque).

Fragmentation in the Fixed Income market continues, with the number of trading venues reaching 128 according to The Trade.

Blog entry from Intelligent Trading Technology about TransFICC connecting to its first 5 trading venues, proving that it works with a mix of instruments, matching and workflow models, and different protocols like binary and FIX.

Interesting to hear that FX is facing similar challenges to those faced by Fixed Income

Steve just finished 'Why Aren't they Shouting?' By Kevin Rodgers, who is recently ex Deutsche Bank FICC. If you want to understand how capital markets work, how banks have evolved and the role of technology, it’s well worth a read.

Judd discusses the benefits of using a single source tree and how to avoid the pitfalls