LedgerEdge, a corporate bond trading platform built on distributed ledger technology (DLT), has joined forces with Charles River Development (CRD), to provide investment firms with access to liquidity from LedgerEdge’s ecosystem via CRD’s Inventory Hub and OEMS.
The partnership enables CRD’s Inventory Hub to deliver an aggregated view of corporate bond liquidity, with the aim of helping firms reduce execution costs and facilitate price discovery. Traders can view inventory in the CRD OEMS, receive updated indications of interest and quotes, and place orders.
LedgerEdge, which is regulated as a multilateral trading facility (MTF) in the UK, plans to expand into EU and US in 2022. It was founded in 2020 by R3 CEO David Rutter and R3 alumnus David Nicol, who is now LedgerEdge’s CEO.
“We need to strike the right balance of being new and different, providing a fundamentally better experience, while making LedgerEdge easy to use and adopt,” says Nicol. “That means integrating with the most commonly used order management systems, which is where the work with CRD comes in. The thing that’s been great about working with CRD is they’ve got a really strong product focus. They’re thinking about their future roadmap and how they’re going to serve their clients’ needs today, tomorrow and in five years.”
Nicol stresses the differences between LedgerEdge’s MTF and a dark pool. “In a dark pool, you just get a match, you don’t get any colour back,” he says. “With LedgerEdge’s smart orders, you can do a search through the system to find resting liquidity, whether that’s orders, holdings, axes, streaming quotes, firm or indicative RFQs, all of those exist in the system. And you, the trader, get to decide how to execute. There’s so much more nuance and value that you can extract, before you even get into the trade.”
The company now plans to integrate with additional platforms, says Nicol. “We have an API that is extremely easy to use. So we’re integrating with lots of custom client systems, and we’ll be integrating with other order management systems besides CRD. We need to be integrated anywhere customers have deep embedded workflow, so we’re working our way through that.”
LedgerEdge is currently in pre-launch status and onboarding customers, with plans for a full launch in 2022.
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