With:
• Stuart Breslow, CEO, Townsend Analytics
• William F Cronin, Managing Director, Knight Capital Group, Inc.
• Jeff Gavin, Product Development Manager, Eze Castle
• Alex Lamb, SVP Business Development, RTS Realtime Systems, Inc.
• Dan Watkins, CEO, North America, Fidessa LatentZero

What new functionality developments are your clients most interested in?

Breslow: The ability to trade globally with multiple brokers across multiple asset classes from a single integrated platform is gaining a lot of traction. Clients want to be confident that the full breadth of features and functionality for each individual asset class is seamlessly offered within these multi-asset platforms.

Cronin: What clients are most interested in is having broad access to liquidity and the ability to trade across multiple asset classes in a broker-neutral, agency-only environment. Clients recognise that a strong EMS must also have grounding in the microstructure of today’s fragmented marketplace, which means it must provide unconflicted access to as many viable pools of liquidity as possible. Anything we can do to support clients in their objective to create alpha in the trading process is where we need to concentrate our energies as it relates to new functionality.

Gavin: Most of our clients have been asking for desktop consolidation, i.e. the ability to drive all functionality across asset classes from one system. Clients want a streamlined workflow for portfolio management, compliance, trading (including execution management) and operations functionality across the asset classes they trade. With a unified front-end that includes both an OMS (order management system) and an EMS (execution management system), the client can access all the trading tools and information they need, whether it’s delivering execution tools or integrating with other third-party systems.

Lamb: In today’s competitive, low-latency trading environment, traders increasingly require real, accurate evidence on transaction execution, i.e. microsecond stamping to verify own metrics and performance. Speed of trading also underpins another key requirement, namely the seamless integration of APIs (application programming interfaces) into trading tools.

Watkins: There is no single answer as it depends on who the client is, i.e. portfolio manager or trader, and the asset class that they trade. The principle value in being a customer of a vendor is the value of community and the shared push forward of the industry. The only constant in integrated trading and execution management is change. Existing algorithms change, new platforms arrive and there is constant pressure for all of this to be provided sooner. At a high level, current demands are in the areas of combined OMS/EMS and over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives. ...

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