The Thomson Reuters Market Data System (TRMDS) price data platform will be able to handle trade messages, such as orders and trade confirmations, in addition to price messages by the latter part of this year, according to the market data and trading technology vendor.
Thomson Reuters said the upgrade will transform TRMDS into a trading network, allowing firms to link to counterparts and venues to manage liquidity fragmentation.
“We are not building a venue. We are linking liquidity pools together,” Terry Roche, executive vice president of information management solutions at Thomson Reuters, told theTRADEnews.com. “We want to bring the same efficiencies to trade messages as we brought to the delivery of price data.”
Thomson Reuters has teamed up with trading solutions provider Smart Trade to offer the new functionality. Price messages are currently handled by TRMDS on a ‘fire and forget’ basis. To enable the verification required for trade messages, Thomson Reuters is implementing a peer-to-peer private messaging service jointly developed with Smart Trade, with the enhanced TRMDS scheduled to go live in Q4 2009.
Roche said the new incarnation of TRMDS will be particularly useful for buy-side firms that, thanks to the development of an increasing number of new trading venues, now have to handle multiple FIX gateways or proprietary delivery methods.
He argued that the new system will also be more cost effective than alternative approaches because it will use application programming interfaces already developed by Thomson Reuters and supports multiple message types. “We don’t want the industry to have to change anything that it is already doing,” Roche said.
The buy-side will play an important role in Thomson Reuters’ trading network, according to Roche. “That is why we are looking at building an appliance that will allow smaller institutions to leverage the capabilities of TRMDS,” he said. The system will be offered on a server and through Thomson Reuters’ hosting service.
TRMDS will integrate Smart Trade’s smartTrade Transaction Platform (STTP) liquidity management and smart order routing system. STTP also incorporates a liquidity aggregation function, a matching engine and connectivity platform.