Bank Vontobel has selected smartTrade Technologies’ hosted LiquidityFX platform to support a new foreign exchange service for spot, forwards and swaps trading. The bank opted for the LiquidityFX solution ahead of other options on the basis of its rich functionality and fast time to market.
Urs Bernegger, head of RM and advisory FX/PM at Bank Vontobel, explains: “The LiquidityFX platform allows us to ramp up our forex offering. It is impressive how fast smartTrade delivered the solution and got us ready to trade on it.”
LiquidityFX was introduced in 2012 and is based on smartTrade’s Liquidity Management System. It includes functionality from connectivity to aggregation, order routing, distribution, order management, post-trade integration and reporting. Connectivity covers more than 40 liquidity providers, many of them in Equinix data centres including NY4, LD4 and TY3 in Tokyo. smartTrade offers LiquidityFX as software only or as a managed service and says the managed service is seeing growing demand, especially among tier two banks and buy side firms.
David Vincent, smartTrade CEO and CTO, says clients are attracted to LiquidityFX by its full lifecycle functionality and its connectivity to liquidity providers. He explains: “We will continue to add liquidity providers depending on client demand. We have our own infrastructure in data centres that host the liquidity providers and can colocate LiquidityFX, which makes client on boarding very efficient as we don’t rely on other providers.”
Looking forward, smartTrade is developing a solution similar to LiquidityFX for the fixed income and rates market. The company already has fixed income liquidity products and clients, but plans to package the products to provide an out-of-the-box, no coding solution. This is due to be available later this year as both software and a managed service.
