For most of its life, Trading Technologies (TT) was known primarily for one thing: futures and options execution (EMS). It was, in the words of Justin Llewellyn-Jones, chief executive, the “tip of the spear” in listed derivatives – the front-end of choice for a generation of traders.
Over the past five years, however, the firm has been quietly redrawing its own boundaries.
“What we want the industry to understand is that we are now so much more than just a futures and options EMS,” Llewellyn-Jones tells The TRADE.
Justin Llewellyn-Jones
“Our whole strategy over the last five years has been pursuing initiatives that expand beyond that pedigree.”
The programme has a name inside the business: multi-X. It is deliberately broader than the multi-asset label the industry reaches for, extending across asset classes, workflow, componentry and geography.
On the asset-class front, TT has added FX and fixed income, with the objective of adding equities and equity options in the future. On workflow, it has expanded outward from the EMS into order management (OMS), middle-office and clearing, then wrapped those with a layer of capital efficiency tools – cross-asset risk, surveillance and margin optimisation.
The commercial logic behind that last piece is one Llewellyn-Jones is happy to spell out: “If firms can free up capital, that means they tend to trade more.” A virtuous cycle in which efficiency and activity reinforce one another.
However, the strategy is ultimately a response to what TT’s clients are asking for.
Its base is unusually broad, spanning individual traders, proprietary trading firms, multi-strats, global macros and hedge funds, commodities houses, corporations, agency brokers and global banks. They trade in very different ways, but the consistent demand, the firm says, is for consolidation.
Built for an asset class-agnostic buy-side
That demand tracks a structural shift on the buy-side. Portfolio managers no longer constrain strategy by asset class, so trading operations have had to follow. The discrete desks the industry once knew have blurred into roles that touch everything, and the tooling has had to keep pace
The problem TT set out to solve is a practical one. “If your PM sends you a trading strategy and you have to break it out into ten different legs – a bit of FX, options, futures and cash – it is just painful,” Llewellyn-Jones asserts.
“From a sell-side perspective, monitoring and supporting buy-side trade flow across multiple systems rather than through a single trading platform is clearly suboptimal.”
“Trying to manage risk and margin becomes a pain. Giving them the tools to trade, but also to manage all those other facets of their trading operations, is what gets them super excited.”
It is also where TT draws its sharpest line against the field. Plenty of vendors claim to be multi-asset; the distinction, the firm argues, lies in what that claim actually rests on. TT’s model is a platform, not a portfolio.
Even acquired solutions are consolidated onto it – single sign on, single order book – rather than bolted on as separate products distinguished by asset class or region. A trader forced to open seven different EMSs, even from one provider under a single master agreement, does not have a multi-asset solution.
As Llewellyn-Jones contends, TT has a collection of solutions. The firm is, in his phrase, “absolutely gung-ho” on the platform approach, believing that it is the only way to give the trader a single place to manage risk, liquidity and capital.
FX, and the case for real-time currency risk
The recently launched FX offering shows the platform logic in action. As buy-side books have become more global and multi-currency, firms have been caught out by what the firm describes as a “swivel effect”, trading cash products in one system while hedging the resulting currency exposure in another.
Frequently, TT saw that FX hedge was already running on its own platform. The question, then, was straightforward – with the spot markets added, what was stopping clients from trading them in the same place?
According to Llewellyn-Jones, what turned that idea into traction was pairing liquidity aggregation with execution tooling clients already knew. By pulling streaming and RFQ liquidity from multiple providers into a single view, and combining it with the sophisticated tools traders use in listed markets, TT could offer both the liquidity and the precision a desk needs in one workflow.
“Liquidity aggregation plus sophisticated execution tools is what really got people excited,” says Llewellyn-Jones.
“The trader can see all the liquidity in one place and use the same tools as in listed markets. This is the true essence of multi-asset trading and what makes us so different from our competitors. And the trade lifecycle does not stop at the point of trade. We provide downstream and operations teams with a single post-trade drop copy, a consolidated view of risk and a single source of truth for surveillance and reporting, driving further efficiencies by providing all of this through TT as a single multi-asset provider.”
The timing reflects the macro backdrop. A wave of interest in European energy – from hedge funds and multi-strats, not only traditional commodity firms – has generated large currency exposures. Layered on top is a run of macro events Llewellyn-Jones is reluctant to call black swans, precisely because they have become too frequent to qualify. The result is a sharper focus across the buy-side on managing FX exposure in real time. The era of navigating regulatory change as a dominant theme, he suggests, has given way to a market where volatility is the new normal, and currency risk harder to treat as an afterthought.
Execution is pulling the whole lifecycle forward
TT’s expansion into post-trade rests on a conviction that execution has become a full-lifecycle problem. Execution remains the tip of the spear, and its sophistication keeps rising; but the innovation happening there (prediction markets, perpetuals, new instruments built to hedge real-world exposure, 24/7 trading, AI) is now dragging everything behind it along too. Workflow, clearing, settlement and operations all have to evolve in step.
Clearing is the example the firm keeps returning to. The trade lifecycle has traditionally been treated as linear, with post-trade data left to settle overnight. As the industry works to compress that lifecycle, TT’s argument is that there is untapped value in surfacing the information earlier. If a sell-side firm can tell a client intraday that a trade is cleared, that frees up capital; if margin can be calculated intraday on a forward-looking basis, so does that.
The future of clearing, in this view, is its shift from a post-trade event into something that happens intraday and feeds directly back into trading decisions.
Where AI helps, and where accuracy sets the limit
TT’s stance on AI is that using it to write, test and deploy code faster is treated as table stakes, “if you’re not doing it already, then you’re falling behind,” says Llewellyn-Jones.
The harder question is how AI is applied inside the solutions themselves. Moving from dashboards toward natural-language interaction is straightforward enough, but a genuinely agentic framework where the agents are making the trading decisions remains “verboten”. Regulation still rests on the principle that a human makes the execution decision.
The firm’s near-term focus is on helping that human decide better. One example is injecting transaction cost analysis directly into an equities algo, so routing decisions can take account of data that was previously too slow to gather in time, something the technology simply could not do before.
In financial services the output has to be binary, and the control frameworks are still maturing. Speed matters, but never at the expense of accuracy and control.
Setting the agenda at TT Connect
That instinct to interrogate the innovation rather than sell against it is the tone TT wants for TT Connect, the firm’s flagship conference themed around the evolution of execution. The event will open with a macro keynote from Dr. Gerard Lyons, Chief Economic Strategist at Netwealth Investments, and one of the UK’s most often quoted economists, to set the scene before pivoting to where the real innovation is happening.
AI is a given. “If we didn’t talk about AI, I think people would wonder what we’re doing,” says Llewellyn-Jones. But the firm wants the sharper conversation to be about hedging the exposure AI creates, from GPU capacity to rising infrastructure costs.
Also on the agenda: the leap from multi-asset to true cross-asset trading and the barriers in the way; the interplay between spot and derivative markets in European power; and the future of clearing. Crucially, TT stresses, it is not a sales pitch. Sessions run under Chatham House rules and the firm deliberately steers away from its own tools, framing the afternoon instead as an open forum for senior buy-side and sell-side professionals to work through where the market is heading, and how it is changing the way they trade.
“We try to be very open – it is definitely not about TT’s tools. These are open forums: let’s talk about how the industry is evolving, what people are seeing and how that is affecting the way they trade.”
TT Connect: The Evolution of Execution is a complimentary afternoon of insights and networking bringing together senior buy-side and sell-side professionals. To find out more information and register, click here.
