The new functionality will enable users of GPT technology to generate and execute multi-asset class, multi-directional trade lists via RFQ+.

According to the firm, this new capability addresses the ongoing need to streamline workflows, as clients seek to integrate GenAI into their pre-trade and trade execution processes.

“In response to clients’ positive engagement with our GenAI-powered app BondGPT and their request for similarly innovative trading capabilities, we developed GenAI-powered List Trading,” said Jim Kwiatkowski, chief executive of LTX.

“This new functionality builds on LTX’s foundation leveraging powerful AI and advanced trading protocols like RFQ+ and RFX to improve efficiency, increase time savings and offer greater flexibility in trading strategies.” 

LTX’s GenAI application BondGPT allows traders to generate lists of bonds based on their specific criteria speedily, which can help construct and execute their list of trades.

Traders can also define rules for auto-execution, allowing for greater workflow efficiency.

Over the past year, LTX has integrated with various firms to enhance its platform. Most recently, LTX integrated with electronic fixed income trading connectivity and integration provider, Multilynq, to accelerate trading connectivity to its platform; and integrated with TS Imagine to bolster mutual buy-side clients’ fixed income liquidity access.

The post Broadridge’s LTX launches GenAI-powered list trading functionality appeared first on The TRADE.

Jim Kwiatkowski

Jim Kwiatkowski, chief executive of LTX, explained: “Most dealers and asset managers are challenged prioritising their scarce technical resources to complete multiple critical technical projects.

“Our partnership with MultiLynq will assist many clients in reducing time to market and quickening access to LTX’s AI-powered pre-trade tools including BondGPT as well as our innovative RFQ+ and RFX trading protocols.”

Read more: Fireside Friday with… Broadridge LTX’s Jim Kwiatkowski

Currently, more than 35 dealers and 90 asset managers operate on Multilynq’s AI-powered corporate bond trading platform.

Specifically, MultiLynq will allow dealers to more easily integrate LTX into their existing infrastructure, thanks to eradicating the need to deploy their own resources. Users will be able to retain their preferred front-end interfaces.

It is an alternative to direct connection, with the key benefits being swift and flexible implementation which saves both time and cost. 

Patrick Scheideler, co-founder of MultiLynq, said: “This collaboration reinforces our continued commitment to offering fixed income market participants a seamless and cost-effective solution for accessing world-class trading venues like LTX.

“By enhancing connectivity and speeding up access to LTX, we are breaking down technology barriers and creating greater efficiency for fixed income market participants.”

The post Broadridge’s LTX integrates with fixed income trading connectivity provider MultiLynq to enhance its platform appeared first on The TRADE.

AJ Cass

The integration will provide buy-side clients with improved pre-trade transparency, price discovery and better access to aggregated liquidity within existing workflows.

“Workflow integration has always been a key element to the LTX strategy as part of our mission to simplify and optimise, embedding new, innovative capabilities within the screens that our clients are familiar with,” said AJ Cass, head of market structure and liquidity at LTX.

“We’re pleased to integrate with TS Imagine, bringing pre-trade transparency and trading efficiencies to our mutual clients’ workflows.”

Read more: Fireside Friday with… Broadridge LTX’s Jim Kwiatkowski

Following the move, LTX’s corporate bond trading capabilities will be directly accessible with TradeSmart Fixed Income.

The integration will also provide LTX order staging for TradeSmart Fixed Income users as well as the ability to submit indications of interest (IOIs) into the LTX Liquidity Cloud – LTX’s network of sell-side axes and anonymous buy-side IOIs.

Liquidity Cloud’s proprietary analysis identifies cloud matches, which are real-time indications of natural contra interest in the Liquidity Cloud, measured by cloud match scores.

The integration will see cloud match scores update dynamically on TradeSmart screens to reflect real-time available natural liquidity.

“Integrating with LTX further enhances the price discovery capabilities available to our clients by offering differentiated liquidity and the ability to manage the entire lifecycle of a trade on a single platform,” said Spencer Lee, chief markets officer at TS Imagine.

The post Broadridge’s LTX integrates with TS Imagine to bolster mutual buy-side clients’ fixed income liquidity access appeared first on The TRADE.

Fragmented liquidity, reduced balance sheet on the sell-side, and increased regulatory burdens have continued to drive change in the market. The fixed income community has had to innovate to remain competitive in an increasingly evolving space. 

Among the key players in this competitive landscape, The TRADE has selected Broadridge’s LTX, FlexTrade Systems, Liquidnet, and Wavelabs.

Broadridge, LTX

Broadridge Financial Solutions subsidiary LTX has made strides over the last 12 months in its mission is to further electronify the corporate bond market. The electronic trading platform enables participants to address challenges associated with accessing liquidity and executing efficiently.

In March, LTX successfully completed the migration of its corporate bond e-trading platform to Amazon Web Services (AWS), allowing LTX to leverage the security and scale of AWS cloud services alongside allowing the firm to better optimise its data science processes. Following this, in June, the business launched BondGPT, an application powered by OpenAI GPT-4 which answers bond-related questions and helps users identify corporate bonds on the LTX platform. Most recently, the business launched an enterprise version of its BondGPT application, named BondGPT+, offering new capabilities focused on the needs of its enterprise client base. The new offering, unveiled earlier this month, incorporating Broadridge technology and OpenAI GPT-4 to answer complex bond-related questions.

In the last year, the data-driven e-platform also launched RFQ+, an enhanced RFQ protocol which combines pre-trade dealer selection analytics with liquidity aggregation capabilities. In July, LTX integrated with BlackRock’s end-to-end investment management and operations platform Aladdin as part of the next phase of the pair’s multi-year partnership.

FlexTrade Systems

Over the past 12 months, multi-asset execution and order management systems provider, FlexTrade has made gone from strength to strength in this space, continually developing its offering to better meet the needs of the market. The business has continued to build out its fixed income execution management system capabilities for its FlexFI solution which can be deployed either standalone or within its integrated multi-asset solution, FlexTRADER EMS.

In December, UBS AM and JP Morgan executed the first EU bilateral trade on FlexFI, made possible through JP Morgan’s ability to provide its electronic liquidity directly into UBS AM’s FlexFi solution. The businesses are working together to provide a transparent way of streamlining workflows and simplifying interactions between the buy- and sell-side in fixed income trading.

In July, FlexTRADER was onboarded by Amundi Asset Management’s execution subsidiary, Amundi Intermédiation to consolidate its trading across asset classes, including fixed income, derivatives and equities.

Liquidnet

Liquidnet has developed its notable work in this space, continuing on with its focused work for the global buy-side community. Last November, Liquidnet expanded its primary markets offering with the addition of live market deals from buy-side order and execution management systems (OEMS) to participating syndicate banks.

Since the initial launch, participant syndicate banks have more than doubled to over 30 who are now sending EMEA deal announcements to Liquidnet. The business has also captured over 1660 new bond deals to trade, with more than 300 traders engaged with the order book, and received $22 billion in order. Invesco Asset Management and Charles River Development (CRD) were the first to facilitate the new functionality following an initial testing period. In January this year, Liquidnet and BondAuction announced their intention to partner to provide their mutual clients access to BondAuction’s offering from their Order Management System. 

Wavelabs 

Fixed income trading technology specialist Wavelabs has been highly active in the market over the last 12 months, working to improve the industry ecosystem, empowering specialists through technological innovation. The business is focused on buy-side fixed income trading and works to facilitate a liquidity-driven marketplace.

Wavelabs’ flagship offering is eLiSa, the execution management system (EMS) is centred around artificial intelligence-based predicative analytics aimed at automating the liquidity seeking process. This June, Wavelabs announced it was set to offer modular version of eLiSA EMS AI-based analytics tools to traders, providing access to eLiSA’s analytics in modular format including its artificial intelligence-based fair value calculator for bonds. Among the key products to now be available in a modular format is the EMS’ predictive fair value (FV) model. ELiSA has seen increasing interest from the buy-side in recent months, onboarding its first hedge fund client the same month.

The post Leaders in Trading 2023: Meet the nominees for… Outstanding Innovation in Fixed Income appeared first on The TRADE.

The new offering incorporates Broadridge technology and OpenAI GPT-4 to answer complex bond-related questions alongside helping users identify corporate bonds on the LTX platform rapidly.

“Since the successful launch of BondGPT in June 2023, we have received overwhelmingly positive feedback and thoughtful suggestions from our clients,” said Jim Kwiatkowski, chief executive of LTX.

“Based on that feedback, we have moved quickly to incorporate clients’ own data as well as a range of new features in the second generation of BondGPT. The result is that BondGPT+ not only meets our clients’ enterprise requirements, but also sets a new standard for generative AI solutions in the financial industry by providing a single natural language interface for seamless access to much of the data used by busy fixed income professionals.”

The enhanced offering allows clients to securely integrate third-party datasets alongside their own data for easier access to critical information. LTX also stated that BondGPT+ is able to integrate into clients’ enterprise applications, including trading workflows.

BondGPT+ also provides more customisation to clients, allowing users to tailor the platform to their requirements by adding preferences to be considered when generating responses.

The new offering also has a focus on enterprise control and governance, with system administrators having the ability to configure levels of data access through user and firm level entitlements via its admin centre.

“Generative AI has the potential to transform the financial services industry by bringing unparalleled efficiencies to core operations,” said Jean Sullivan, head of wealth management at Celent.

“By integrating BondGPT+’s natural language capabilities and curated data sources with clients’ own data in their own systems, LTX is helping market participants make smarter, more streamlined decisions through easier access to the mountains of disparate data they deal with every day.”

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The integration incorporates LTX’s Liquidity Cloud and actionable pre-trade cloud match scores directly in the Aladdin platform, allowing users of Aladdin technology to leverage data-driven capabilities to improve liquidity discovery and trading efficiency.

LTX’s Liquidity Cloud provides a network of anonymous real-time buy- and sell-side indications of interest. Proprietary analysis within the network identifies cloud matches – real-time indications of natural contra interest in the Liquidity Cloud – which are then measured by cloud match scores. These scores are updated dynamically to reflect real-time available natural liquidity. 

“Some of the world’s largest institutional investors use Aladdin for their end-to-end trading workflows, and we are pleased that this integration enables common clients of LTX and Aladdin to seamlessly access trading functionalities of both platforms,” said Jim Kwiatkowski, chief executive of LTX.

“We are committed to facilitating positive transformation in the corporate bond market with data-driven pre-trade intelligence and liquidity aggregation; this integration offers these advancements within existing buy-side workflows.”

This latest phase of the integration will allow mutual clients to view cloud match scores directly within the Aladdin application OEMS, alongside the ability to directly interact with trading opportunities in the Liquidity Cloud without a staging area.

Users of Aladdin can now contribute their anonymous interests to the Liquidity Cloud and as a result, identify natural contra liquidity.

“We look forward to empowering our users with innovative pre-trade liquidity discovery capabilities and trading solutions like LTX for more seamless and efficient corporate bond trading workflows,” said Kamya Somasundaram, managing director, and a general manager within Aladdin at BlackRock.

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The new protocol, which was developed to reduce information leakage, builds on existing RFQ workflows and facilitates larger trades through the aggregation of multiple dealer responses for their desired amounts.

The move follows the recent launch of BondGPT, powered by OpenAI GPT-4, developed to help simplify workflows and increase efficiency for users’ bond selection and portfolio construction processes – which sees LTX build towards the next generation of AI-enabled workflows.

 “RFQ+ combines AI-powered pre-trade Dealer Selection Scores with novel liquidity aggregation functionality to solve genuine client pain points and further electronify the segment of the market that is still being traded bilaterally,” said Jim Kwiatkowski, chief executive of LTX.

“This is the most recent example of LTX using emerging technologies to drive efficiency in the corporate bond market to the benefit of dealers and the buy-side.”

Dealer Selection Scores gives buy-side clients the ability to optimise the number of dealers that a client sends each RFQ, based on dealers’ real-time and historical LTX Liquidity Cloud input as well as pricing and platform behaviour. Dealers also benefit from Dealer Selection Scores, as it allows them to enhance direct networking to clients.

Once an RFQ+ is sent to an optimal group of dealers, various dealer responders are able to bid or offer for the size they each want. Technology then aggregates the bids/offers, giving buy-side clients the ability to fulfil the block in one session with multiple dealers.

“Executing size in today’s credit markets is often challenging,” said Steve Chylinski, head of FI trading at Eagle Asset Management.

“The approach that LTX is taking to build on the familiar RFQ protocol with RFQ+, the innovative aggregation capabilities and AI powered Dealer Selection Scores can potentially be a game changer for the buy-side and dealers to execute larger trades electronically.”

The post Broadridge’s LTX launches new AI-powered RFQ+ protocol to better facilitate larger trades appeared first on The TRADE.

The application incorporates real-time liquidity information from LTX Liquidity Cloud to simplify workflows and increase efficiency for users’ bond selection and portfolio construction processes, which LTX stated will benefit asset managers hedge funds and dealers.

According to the firm, BondGPT combines GPT-4 with LTX’s analytics and underlying dataset for data timeliness, accuracy and compliance in the highly regulated financial services sector, avoiding hallucination issues common in other implementations.

“Emerging technologies such as generative AI hold immense potential to drive electronification and transparency in the corporate bond market,” said Jim Kwiatkowski, CEO of LTX.

“By increasing the use of data and applications like BondGPT, market participants can inform and expedite vital pricing decisions, facilitate counterparty selection, and broaden liquidity access. We are proud to accelerate the use of these innovations as we work towards smarter and more efficient trading processes for the industry.”

Earlier this year, LTX successfully completed the migration of its corporate bond e-trading platform to Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The completed migration allows LTX to leverage the security and scale of AWS cloud services alongside allowing the firm to better optimise its data science processes. The move also enables clients to make better informed corporate bond trading decisions based on transparency and real-time insights.

“BondGPT powered by OpenAI GPT-4 is available to all Broadridge LTX clients today,” said Martin Koopman, chief product officer and co-head of AI at Broadridge.

“It adds generative AI to build on the AI neural network that LTX has used since launch. BondGPT is the first of many products and services Broadridge will release to our clients using this powerful technology in a safe manner, leveraging our deep regulatory knowledge and data privacy standards.”

The post Broadridge’s LTX launches OpenAI GPT-4 powered application to service bond market appeared first on The TRADE.

The completed migration will allow LTX to leverage the security and scale of AWS cloud services alongside allowing the firm to better optimise its data science processes.

The move will enable clients to make better informed corporate bond trading decisions based on transparency and real-time insights.

“By moving its trading platform and critical business applications to AWS, LTX can bring even more intelligence and improved functionality for corporate bond traders in an environment where security and resiliency are the highest priority,” said Scott Mullins, managing director, Worldwide Financial Services at AWS. 

“As LTX and AWS continue working together, we will modernise e-trading technology while providing increased privacy, agility and scalability for LTX clients.”

Improved machine learning monitoring and scalability will be able to be leveraged by LTX and its platform data to securely create more robust datasets.

In addition, the migration will enable LTX to offer more advanced analysis of its Liquidity Cloud – the LTX network of anonymous real-time buy- and sell-side indications of interest.

LTX stated that it will enhance its pricing, dealer selection, client recommendation, and similar bonds functionalities, better helping buy-side investors and dealers to make smarter trading decisions.   

“LTX is committed to offering innovative e-trading technology that facilitates transparency and liquidity discovery,” said Jim Kwiatkowski, CEO of LTX. 

“By migrating to AWS, LTX can leverage the scalability of the cloud to continue to deliver enhanced data and execution capabilities to our clients.”

The post Broadridge’s LTX migrates to AWS to bolster data-driven corporate bond trading capabilities appeared first on The TRADE.

Daniel Morris, chief market strategist, BNP Paribas Asset Management

One can easily think of ways in which the situation could yet worsen: a breakdown in a key financial market due to the rapid rise in interest rates, a cold winter and blackouts in Europe, or a flare-up in geopolitical tensions between the US and China. Europe is facing an energy shock unlike anything the region has seen since the OPEC price increases in the 1970s. Even though gas prices have moderated of late, they are still 10 times higher than the average in 2019. Inflation is in double digits in some countries, consumer sentiment has collapsed, and demand is weakening along with disposable income. Nonetheless, we believe headline inflation has peaked and will return to the ECB’s 2% target in 2024.

Jim Kwiatkowski, CEO, LTX: The capital markets industry experienced a particularly volatile 2H 2022 as investors grappled with a looming recession and peak inflation. This year will be remembered as the year when market participants were forced to adjust to a drastically different environment due to a hawkish approach from the Fed, the war in Ukraine and persistent supply chain issues altering the trading landscape.

The US corporate bond market was not unscathed by these challenges, which will continue to have ripple effects well into 2023. We expect the Fed’s tightening of monetary policy to continue, with the process ending in the first half of 2023 and interest rates and inflation remaining relatively high throughout the year. We expect high rates and recessionary concerns to continue to hold back the new issue market. Amidst these conditions, the availability of secondary market liquidity will be a key challenge that market participants will continue to solve for in 2023. We expect to see electronic bond trading reach record levels with the employment of innovative artificial intelligence (AI) and technology that increase transparency while minimizing information leakage. We also anticipate the further adoption of advanced trading tools for more efficient e-trading of large orders.

Matt McLoughin, head of trading, LionTrust: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.” After an interesting covid-filled, couple of years, it is fair to say that 2022 did not disappoint with the number of challenges it brought for the market.   I think that 2023 will continue to be an “interesting” trading environment, but one that will bring new opportunities.  As the guardians of investors’ financial futures, we have a duty to invest responsibly and with that in mind, I see ESG factors remaining front and centre of investors’ minds next year.  I am hopeful that the increase in global interest rates that we have experienced will achieve its aim of controlling inflation and that the cost of living crisis doesn’t last as long as expected.  I am very much looking forward to Ireland winning the Rugby World Cup on the 28th October 2023!

Jason Xavier, head of EMEA ETF capital markets, Franklin Templeton: We expect 2023 to be a bumpy year for financial markets globally. We think it will be a year for playing defence, optimising income, and tactically looking for a weakening dollar to potentially allocate to emerging markets (EM). My main prediction centres around this defensive play. As such, we believe multi-factor smart beta ETFs, especially those focused on quality and income generating strategies, will outperform their relative AUM growth from this year as the decade of “cheap” money and record low interest rates is gone. The by-product of such monetary policy over the last decade has certainly benefited ETFs and index funds and in particular market capitalisation weighted schemes, often heavily overweight growth stocks, was a good “buy and hold” strategy returning solid annualised returns.

However, the new interest rate environment calls for a more tactical approach to asset allocation and equity market exposures. Hence, ETF investors may start looking favourably on alternative weighting schemes such as multi-factor smart beta ETFs, which consider stock fundamentals in addition to just the market capitalisation of a stock. We believe this is a strong growth area next year.

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