Next up in our introduction to the distinguished nominees for Leaders in Trading 2023 Editors’ Choice Awards, we bring you the shortlist for Outstanding Innovation in Fixed Income.
Fragmented liquidity, reduced balance sheet on the sell-side, and increased regulatory burdens have continued to drive change in the market. The fixed income community has had to innovate to remain competitive in an increasingly evolving space.
Among the key players in this competitive landscape, The TRADE has selected Broadridge’s LTX, FlexTrade Systems, Liquidnet, and Wavelabs.
Broadridge, LTX
Broadridge Financial Solutions subsidiary LTX has made strides over the last 12 months in its mission is to further electronify the corporate bond market. The electronic trading platform enables participants to address challenges associated with accessing liquidity and executing efficiently.
In March, LTX successfully completed the migration of its corporate bond e-trading platform to Amazon Web Services (AWS), allowing LTX to leverage the security and scale of AWS cloud services alongside allowing the firm to better optimise its data science processes. Following this, in June, the business launched BondGPT, an application powered by OpenAI GPT-4 which answers bond-related questions and helps users identify corporate bonds on the LTX platform. Most recently, the business launched an enterprise version of its BondGPT application, named BondGPT+, offering new capabilities focused on the needs of its enterprise client base. The new offering, unveiled earlier this month, incorporating Broadridge technology and OpenAI GPT-4 to answer complex bond-related questions.
In the last year, the data-driven e-platform also launched RFQ+, an enhanced RFQ protocol which combines pre-trade dealer selection analytics with liquidity aggregation capabilities. In July, LTX integrated with BlackRock’s end-to-end investment management and operations platform Aladdin as part of the next phase of the pair’s multi-year partnership.
FlexTrade Systems
Over the past 12 months, multi-asset execution and order management systems provider, FlexTrade has made gone from strength to strength in this space, continually developing its offering to better meet the needs of the market. The business has continued to build out its fixed income execution management system capabilities for its FlexFI solution which can be deployed either standalone or within its integrated multi-asset solution, FlexTRADER EMS.
In December, UBS AM and JP Morgan executed the first EU bilateral trade on FlexFI, made possible through JP Morgan’s ability to provide its electronic liquidity directly into UBS AM’s FlexFi solution. The businesses are working together to provide a transparent way of streamlining workflows and simplifying interactions between the buy- and sell-side in fixed income trading.
In July, FlexTRADER was onboarded by Amundi Asset Management’s execution subsidiary, Amundi Intermédiation to consolidate its trading across asset classes, including fixed income, derivatives and equities.
Liquidnet
Liquidnet has developed its notable work in this space, continuing on with its focused work for the global buy-side community. Last November, Liquidnet expanded its primary markets offering with the addition of live market deals from buy-side order and execution management systems (OEMS) to participating syndicate banks.
Since the initial launch, participant syndicate banks have more than doubled to over 30 who are now sending EMEA deal announcements to Liquidnet. The business has also captured over 1660 new bond deals to trade, with more than 300 traders engaged with the order book, and received $22 billion in order. Invesco Asset Management and Charles River Development (CRD) were the first to facilitate the new functionality following an initial testing period. In January this year, Liquidnet and BondAuction announced their intention to partner to provide their mutual clients access to BondAuction’s offering from their Order Management System.
Wavelabs
Fixed income trading technology specialist Wavelabs has been highly active in the market over the last 12 months, working to improve the industry ecosystem, empowering specialists through technological innovation. The business is focused on buy-side fixed income trading and works to facilitate a liquidity-driven marketplace.
Wavelabs’ flagship offering is eLiSa, the execution management system (EMS) is centred around artificial intelligence-based predicative analytics aimed at automating the liquidity seeking process. This June, Wavelabs announced it was set to offer modular version of eLiSA EMS AI-based analytics tools to traders, providing access to eLiSA’s analytics in modular format including its artificial intelligence-based fair value calculator for bonds. Among the key products to now be available in a modular format is the EMS’ predictive fair value (FV) model. ELiSA has seen increasing interest from the buy-side in recent months, onboarding its first hedge fund client the same month.