Plato Partnership has exclusively revealed to The TRADE plans to focus on new initiatives as it formalises its structure with an academic subsidiary.
The Partnership has established a governance structure which includes a new Academic Advisory Board, a Plato Strategic Initiatives Group and a Turquoise Plato Expert Group.
Two senior academics have already joined the Academic Advisory Board, within Plato’s Market Innovator (MI3) unit, that will focus on deciding which market structure issue Plato will focus next on moving forward.
J. Doyne Farmer, co-director of the complexity economics program at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School and Andrei Kirilenko, director of the centre for global finance and technology, a senior research fellow at the Brevan Howard Centre for Financial Analysis, have officially joined the Academic Advisory Board.
Nej D’jelal, one of Plato Partnership’s co-chairs and head of electronic equities product for EMEA at Barclays, said the MI3 unit will introduce academic research to provide a more objective message for the broader market.
“Plato is well-positioned to highlight what the key issues are and to attack those problems. With MI3, we are working with some of the most esteemed academic leaders who join us in this endeavour and represent an advisory body that will feed into our process that elects specific topics,” he said.
D’jelal added that Plato Partnership already has a “backlog of ideas” which will be examined and vetted by the new Academic Advisory Board.
Mike Bellaro, the other co-chair of Plato Partnership and global head of equity trading at Deutsche Asset Management, asserted that the Turquoise Plato Expert Group will continue to bring innovation to the market, particularly around block trading.
“We have created something that is sustainable and we will continue to develop Turquoise Plato as it’s a very important component of Plato Partnership, but there will be new initiatives that we announce in the coming months that will reflect our intention to solve other types of market structure challenges,” he said.
The TRADE’s full ‘Big Interview’ with the Plato team will be published online next week.