A Virtual View - Fixed Income Trading and Best Execution

Last week we took part in TABB Group’s virtual Fixed Income summit, a busy event with more than 750 attendees.

Our Takeaways -

1. Automation is Key
   In the drive for increased efficiency, large buy- and sell-side firms are combining vendor solutions with proprietary technology, to develop new automated workflows using APIs. Where API data is available, workflows can be automated, which reduces manual processing.
   
   
2. Sophisticated Workflows
   Technology is being used to address increasingly complex workflows in Fixed Income. As an example, Portfolio Trading was mentioned a number of times during the summit, where firms are now able to take a basket of bonds of varying duration and credit quality and trade them in a single transaction.
   
   
3. Acceptance of New Technologies
   There is growing acceptance of the Cloud in financial markets, as many people see that it passed the test in 2020. Also, open source was once regarded as a threat to banks’ IP, but now is viewed in a different light. Common industry pain points have pushed firms to use it more widely for commoditised parts of the technology stack (although there is still some disparity between the number of firms using open source and those contributing to it)

Many thanks to Bruce Morris from TABB and Ari Burstein from Capital Market Strategies for organising the event – we look forward to next year and hope that we can meet everyone in person