Jason Hoang

The move will allow its clients access to a low-cost mechanism to trade fixed income, as well as access to comprehensive liquidity from fixed income providers and venues across the US, Europe and APAC.

Speaking to The TRADE, Jason Hoang, chief executive of Iress global trading and market data, explained: “We’re seeing increasing demand from our customers for a single entry-point to fixed income markets.

“This collaboration ensures our clients can easily access the liquidity and services they need.”

Hoang also flagged that fixed income demand is firmly on the up, with 20% of customer order flows being aligned to fixed income as an asset class in some cases.

As a specialist in fixed income execution and workflow automation and large-scale analytics solutions, Ediphy has aggregated liquidity in excess of 250,000 international securities identification numbers (ISINs). 

Specifically, Ediphy offers automated execution in: government, sovereign, supranational, and agency bonds, credit bonds and cleared interest rate swaps.

“Investment managers are finding fixed income electronic trading more complex and costly than ever. Ediphy’s partnership enables Iress clients to obtain an advanced global fixed income trading capability, with minimal cost and effort, Christopher Murphy, chief executive of Ediphy tells The TRADE.

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The offering is aimed at UK broker-dealers and enables clients, the liquidity providers, to benefit from more streamlined order management, increased market connectivity, real time data and analytics, and robust compliance, as well as enhanced risk and market-making capabilities.

Ian Mawdsley, chief product officer at Broadridge trading and connectivity solutions highlighted that the partnership will allow for an inclusive offering: “By combining our order management and advanced market-making tools with access to the Iress RSP network, we are bringing a comprehensive solution to the market at a time when few complete solutions have been available.”

Read more – Charles River Development on OEMS vs OMS and EMS

The joint trading and connectivity solution has been tailored specifically to UK market makers, with full access to the retail and wealth community.

Ray Pretorius, managing director at Iress UK trading, said: “The strategic partnership with Broadridge coincides with focused investment into the RSP platform for enhanced data insights and execution services to retail brokers and wealth managers.”

Last month, Broadridge launched BRx Match, a cloud-based reconciliation and matching solution aimed at tackling reconciliation and data integrity challenges.

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Mohammed Sohail, head of trading, Sarasin & Partners:

Neil Ryan, regulatory lead, FINBOURNE Technology: As the process of refining the requirements for a bond consolidated tape (CT) draws to a close, buy- and sell-side, and regulatory bodies are looking past the data quality challenges previously identified, to the practicalities of how a CT will deliver data. Taking an interoperable, API-first approach to CT data is going to be the first step towards joining up data with complete accuracy and confidence. However, while APIs are an essential starting point, they are not a complete strategy in themselves. Firms will need to consider whether they have the right control environment, entitlements protocol and domain knowledge, to translate across these data sets and the varying formats each uses, to garner granular insights that will drive growth. One obstacle we see in the way of this and will be a key theme for 2023 is the legacy infrastructure capital markets firms currently operate in, given recent reports have found as many as 60% of buy- and sell side-firms are still reliant on a mainframe – despite the industry push towards the cloud.

The advent of CT offers an opportune time to review the investment technology and data processes in place, and whether these will enable firms to efficiently extract and derive value from CT data, without additional cost and resourcing. This is particularly timely in a market with heightened volatility and geopolitical disruption. Being able to harness real-time data across critical data sets – including CT data – to gain a live view of positions, portfolio, risk, and exposure is going to be critical. A combination of a fit-for-purpose CT, an open API strategy and a holistic approach to organisational data delivered by the right data stack, will create the most consistent and valuable understanding of market prices. Crucially, pairing insights from CT data with other data sets and making it available across the organisation, not only promotes greater access to liquidity across functions, but ultimately, greater transparency of market opportunities, for growth and prosperity.

Lionel Sancenot, managing director Continental Europe, IRESS: For trading desks in 2023, we see a few key trends developing around market data, driven by growing client demand for better flexibility in their data provision partners. Desktop interoperability will play a more important role. Today, trading firms are not only interested in the quality and insights of market data, but also the ability to work seamlessly across multiple applications, driven by the need to be more efficient in a cost-conscious world. We see the potential for consolidation in the data provision sector, via increased M&A across market data infrastructure providers. To remain competitive as clients’ requirements consistently expand, larger organisations will be looking to secure additional data streams covering more instruments, markets and geographies to offer their clients, as well as owning unique data sets to commercialise. We expect market data providers will also keep pace with volatile markets by committing to new sites (such as the Euronext data site in Bergamo, Italy), giving them better proximity to exchanges, keeping latencies as low as possible. More market data solutions will move to the cloud and we expect discussions will progress in the Eurozone on the consolidated tape, however we doubt a resolution will be found next year.  

Brandon Tepper, senior vice president of investment intelligence at Nasdaq: High inflation, rising interest rates, and heightened uncertainty have led to increased market volatility and magnified the importance of investors having greater access to actionable data and analytics. Emerging strategies that we’re expecting to see investors lean in on to help them recession-proof their portfolios include leveraging macro-level data as a key leading indicator of economic health. As part of diversification strategies, we see the potential for investors to tap into ESG, commodities and digital assets, and growing financial markets such as Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East for new opportunities. Technology advancements and simple APIs that are accessible via the cloud improves optionality helping investors better catalogue and interact with their data unlocking efficiencies across their businesses. Our position at the intersection of the markets, technology and finance gives us a unique perspective to build demand-driven market-based solutions. With this position, we anticipate and are committed to creating a more seamless data experience helping investors gain investible insights.

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Access to data is getting easier, but access to alpha-generating insight will remain a priority for market participants in 2022. As the volume and types of data available to market participants continues to grow, so do the challenges of analysing huge, complex and highly interconnected data sets.  Over the last 12 months, we have seen increasing demand for Level 3 equities data and analytics tools from capital markets participants looking to generate alpha more predictably and gain an edge. 

It’s not only in equities where traders will be seeking an edge. We’ve seen great demand for our Level 3 data sets across futures asset classes, including equity futures, fixed income, short-term interest rates, commodities, cryptocurrencies and even FX. To use them effectively requires scalable compute capability and harmonisation – allowing quants to spend less time gathering, organising and cleaning data, and more time deriving predictive insights. When you understand the predictive power of Level 3 data, you understand the future was created yesterday!

Digitisation is starting to affect even the world of market data distribution. 2022 will present numerous opportunities for all participants in the data supply chain to contribute to much needed transparency and automation improvements. This is long overdue, given that while the eminence of data goes undisputed, in reality the complexity of global markets has outgrown the methods designed to support market data administration.

Business processes that have traditionally depended on human interpretation will potentially be automated, if all industry participants look for the big picture. This automation of market data can help drive efficiencies in financial markets, reduce costs and administrative burdens and, ultimately, allow all participants in the data supply chain to focus more on high-value activities.

We see demand for high-frequency data continuing to rise in 2022 amongst economists and analysts, as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic continues to make more traditional, periodic measures of macroeconomic activity insufficient in understanding global markets.  In addition, we believe that the immediacy with which information is updated and analysed, and the potential for ongoing travel restrictions, mean that collaboration tools, such as our recently launched Macrobond Viewer, will be more important in helping teams stay in touch and work efficiently with the latest information.  The transition to remote or hybrid working and analysing high-frequency data points has now happened, and even as we hope for a world without COVID-19, we feel that returning to using only traditional measures of macroeconomic activity such as GDP figures and quarterly employment numbers is unlikely. The future of macroeconomic measurement and prediction is more and better high-frequency data.

The next year will continue to see an explosion in the types of data available to the market. Traders, quants, regulators and researchers have access to an ever-growing choice of complex data and analytics but are faced with the real challenge of how to use them effectively to drive performance. Flexibility will be crucial for users to get the data they need, the way they want it. Some will want data delivered via full platform solutions and others to pull data only as necessary through APIs. Some will want simple raw data, and others complete sets of analytics.  Continued development of cloud capabilities and greater acceptance of open architectures will drive more collaboration – and help the buy-side and sell-side take full advantage of the expanded possibilities over the coming year.

We believe data and the implementation of a consolidated tape (CT) for equities and bonds will be one of the main focus globally in 2022. The European Commission (EC) recently released a proposal for a CT and officially recommended FIX’s Market Model Typology (MMT) to be mandated as a standard. Having access to effective, reliable and contextualised data has never been a more critical factor and establishing a CT will remain an ongoing and massive effort. Industry participants should be a part of the conversation to ensure its success, and we invite them to get involved in FIX’s working groups to help us create good effective data and bring to life a CT in equities and bonds.

Consolidated tape (CT) reforms will finally take shape in 2022 with the UK and EU adopting legislation for the provision of a tape and the mitigation of market data access and contribution issues. The role of a CT will morph from responsibilities to consolidate data, to a facilitator of the data contributions which will be mandated and in need of operational management. Consolidation itself will be conducted by the industry through existing infrastructure. Cloud technology will feature heavily in the consolidated tape. In the US, the plan to enable competing consolidators will likely be postponed further but the governance reforms will be adopted as a means of addressing inherent conflicts and independent representation and voting for tape users and end investor advocates.

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The new global team acts as the final step in the integration of the QuantHouse business with Iress’s existing market data capabilities, following the acquisition in May 2019.

This follows an update in QuantHouse’s leadership team amid its integration into Iress, which saw Arthur Tricoire and Sebastien Tiphine appointed as general manager for its global commercial business and head of products, respectively.

Financial services firms have increasingly begun to adopt API data and cloud services at pace. A recent study from Google found that 67% of surveyed sell-side firms consume cloud-deployed market data, while 88% intend to consume more in the coming year.

The survey found that buy-side firms have an even higher rate, with 90% of surveyed firms consuming cloud-deployed market data today, with 70% intending to increase that in the next year.

Iress’s new API data and trading solutions team has been created to support these firms and help them take advantage of the transition.

Iress’s product set offering includes market data feed API solutions such as the QuantFEED low latency data platform; data products such as historical data on-demand, reference data and analytics; and infrastructure and connectivity such as managed hosting and connectivity solutions.

“We now offer a comprehensive suite of trading data solutions, coupled with managed services, to provide end-to-end trading solutions either on-prem or on cloud platforms. These capabilities, together with our focused global team, puts us in a strong position to respond to fast evolving requirements in today’s volatile markets, where timeliness means opportunity,” said Tricoire.

“As part of our commitment to deliver for our clients, we will continue to stay ahead of market trends through constant reinvestment and future-proofing of our products and systems. We are confident that current and prospective clients alike will find value in our expanded capabilities and our ability to help them perform at their best.”

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As part of the transition, Pierre Feligioni, who co-founded QuantHouse in 2005 and has since acted as chief executive officer, is departing to pursue new opportunities.

Arthur Tricoire, who has served in various positions at QuantHouse over the years, most recently as managing director for the Asia Pacifc region, has been appointed general manager for its global commercial business.

Alongside this appointment, Sebastien Tiphine, who most recently served as presales team lead and product strategy, has been appointed head of products.

According to QuantHouse, these changes will allow the firm to continue to execute on behalf of 500 global clients through closer alignment with Iress following its acquisition by the firm.

Iress announced in 2019 that it would be acquiring QuantHouse for €38.9 million, subject to material earnout for the period ongoing until the end of this year.

“Given the increased adoption of API data platforms in open application ecosystems and booming processing availability, we are thrilled to blend our expertise within a dedicated team at Iress,” said Tricoire. “This will allow us to support the evolving requirements of data driven trading systems, helping our clients perform at their best.” 

Alongside the promotions of Tricoire and Tiphine, other key appointments include Denery Fenouil as head of engineering, Anna Pesman as head of client services and Salloum Abousaleh as managing director for the Americas.

“We are committed to enhance the value we offer to clients, taking full advantage of a combined technology platform. This deeper relationship with Iress will provide tangible benefits for our clients,” said Tiphine.

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Markets software provider Iress will shift its execution management system (EMS) to its cloud platform under a trading technology strategy for the UK.

Iress said the transition will allow the firm to deploy new services and scale on-demand, following growth in the use of its EMS over the last 12 months, both in terms of new client and trading volumes.

Clients will also be able to increase of decrease trading capacity according to market and business needs and implement new functionality in shorter development cycles.

“The investment Iress has made in its cloud foundations underpins Iress’ growth and acceleration plans in bringing trading products to the market. Iress’ cloud capability brings operating benefits, flexibility and scalability for our clients in an ever-changing market,” said Eugene O’Herlihy, executive general manager for trading and market data in the UK at Iress.  

“Accessing new markets, increasing trading capacity and additional services will be greatly simplified and accelerated and will help to drive further growth and business innovation.”

The trading technology provider added that amid a 60% increase in global equity trading volume in the first quarter of 2020 compared to the fourth quarter in 2019, its EMS processed record volume, highlighting a need for greater flexibility and agility.

The transition at Iress follows its recent partnership with Chart IQ to integrate the firm’s charting software onto its market data platform, Iress Pro. ChartIQ delivered next-generation charting capabilities to its clients, and incorporate pre-and post-trade analytics tools to help users visualise the complete lifecycle of a trade.

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Markets trading software provider Iress has partnered with FinTech Cosaic to integrate the firm’s charting software, ChartIQ, onto its market data platform, Iress Pro.

Iress said the addition of ChartIQ will bring next generation charting capabilities to its clients, and incorporate pre-and post-trade analytics tools to help users visualise the complete lifecycle of a trade.

“We are pleased to partner with Cosaic on this integration, which builds on our legacy of delivering innovative market data and trading solutions,” said Eugene O’Herlihy, head of trading and market data at Iress. 

“The ChartIQ integration provides users with an even broader range of charting options and functionality to comprehensively analyse and model data available within Iress Pro.”

Iress Pro clients can chart yield curves for rate interpolation, and create and chart user-defined instruments for scenario simulations through the integration with Chart IQ. The pair added it will also bring a redesigned user interface and navigation with improved efficiency and usability.

“[Iress] are a future-forward company that understands the value of bringing best-in-breed charting technology and UX to their 12,000 users. We look forward to seeing how our charts improve the day-to-day workflow of their users,” said Dan Schleifer, chief executive officer of Cosaic. 

The partnership follows a rebranding that ChartIQ underwent in July last year, renaming itself Cosaic and merging the Chart IQ platform with its smart desktop platform, Finsemble, under the new brand.

Prior to the rebranding, ChartIQ also launched a new visualisation tool, known as Term Structure Graph, to see price fluctuations instantaneously across the recently more volatile fixed income and derivatives markets. 

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Iress has integrated its trading platform with the Fusion request for quote (RFQ) platform from TP ICAP in a bid to give traders greater choice of execution venues.

Through the integration, users of the Iress trading platform will gain access to Fusion RFQ’s global pool of over 30 liquidity providers and 14,500 instruments for better operational efficiency and liquidity access without the need for bilateral agreements.

Firms will be able to trade pre-and post-market across single stock equities and ETFs with the combination, which broadens Iress’ liquidity partners.

“This [integration] will provide a frictionless workflow for clients looking for extremely fast and efficient execution across Pan EU Single Stock Equities and ETFs,” said Patric Okumi, head of EMEA sales for TP ICAP Fusion RFQ.

“Our unique positioning allows us to provide access to a vast network of liquidity providers offering pricing during continuous and even pre/post market hours without the hassle of multiple bilateral relationships.”

TP ICAP clients will also gain access to a larger pool of liquidity through the Iress trading community through the integration.

“We know access to liquidity is crucial for professional traders. This is why we’re pleased to add TP ICAP’s Fusion RFQ to our trading platform, providing greater flexibility and efficiency in a competitive market,” said Eugene O’Herlihy, head of trading and market data UK at Iress.

The partnership with Iress is the second integration of TP ICAP’s Fusion RFQ in recent months, after trading systems provider TORA expanded its order and execution management system with access to the equity and ETF liquidity platform in November.

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ASX, which first invested in the technology vendor in 2000 following its initial public offering, said in a statement that the sale at $11.95 per share is expected to raise $385 million.  

Dominic Stevens, CEO and managing director at ASX, commented that IRESS has been an attractive investment for the exchange operator over many years, but the investment no longer provides the strategic value for ASX as it once did.

“When ASX invested in IRESS’s initial public offering in 2000, both ASX and IRESS, were predominantly focused on servicing the Australian equities market. Since then, both businesses have successfully evolved and expanded,” he added.

The sale of the 18.6% stake in IRESS will end an almost twenty-year long relationship between the two firms, and during that time, both firms worked alongside each other to develop ASX’s trading platform and technology.

“The ASX has been an IRESS shareholder since our initial public offering in 2000. Since that time, we have continued to maintain and grow our Australian business in trading, market data and wealth, while also growing into a strong and diversified international technology company,” IRESS chief executive, Andrew Walsh, also commented.

ASX is currently working to replace its CHESS clearing and settlement system with a blockchain-based system. Working with blockchain specialist Digital Asset, ASX delayed the launch of the new system last year to 2021, with initial testing expected to begin later this year.

ASX’s Stevens commented at the time the project was announced that replacing CHESS with blockchain technology should enable clients to develop new services and reduce costs, while bringing Australia to the forefront of innovation in financial markets.

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