Quod Financial has added a middle office component to its multi-asset OMS/EMS platform, aimed at allowing customers to automate complex trading workflows. Quod Middle Office is a hosted STP platform that seeks to address inefficient manual processes across all asset classes including equities, derivatives, foreign exchange and fixed income, as well as digital assets.
The new platform allows users to consolidate flows from a range of front office systems and execution venues, to create a single multi-asset golden source for booking and allocations. It also handles post-trade FIX allocations, commissions, fee enrichment and integration with DTCC’s CTM platform, as well as integration capabilities with customers’ back office systems.
The main drivers behind the product were to increase efficiencies and reduce costs in the middle office through greater automation, says Ling Lee, Equities Product Director at Quod Financial.
“As a middle office user, I only want to be notified if and when I need to intervene,” he says. “Otherwise, I shouldn’t need to do anything. That’s the system’s job. By automating these processes, but with enough granular controls for the users, the middle office workflows become much more efficient, as users can concentrate on the important stuff that they either need to troubleshoot or talk to their buy side or sell side counterparties about. And by providing greater process optimisation not only are we making their lives easier, we’re also reducing costs because the cost of settlement failure can be very high”.
A key aspect of the new product is its multi-asset capabilities, says Lee. “Being truly multi asset is mission-critical,” he says, “and we’ve built the foundation to be able to process multi asset instruments, so we can continue to enhance existing workflows per asset class. You can’t always treat equities like fixed income or derivatives, as they can have different requirements. By leveraging a common data structure underneath, it allows us to create multi-asset workflow solutions, but within one platform, so our customers don’t have to go out and buy another system just for a different asset class”.
Ease of integration is another important element, says Lee. “CTM trade matching and post-trade FIX allocation are standard features of the Middle Office product”, he says. “We can integrate with our customers’ back offices via FIX, with the ability to customise or adapt to the various different in-house or vendor back office solutions.”
Quod Middle Office is offered as a hosted solution from data centres in London, New York, Frankfurt, Paris, Hong Kong, Tokyo, or as a managed service on-premise.
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