Ullink is developing a portfolio of Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II (MiFID II) products, the latest being an automated trade reporting solution designed to help firms comply with the post-trade transparency rules of the regulation. Coming soon are a post-trade data management product that will create a client order biographies necessary to record keeping under MiFID II, and a solution to help systematic internalisers (SIs) meet pre-trade quote transparency obligations.
The trade reporting solution, UL Trade Reporting, supports cross-asset class reporting and by virtue of its automation can meet MiFID II rules requiring all trade details of eligible financial instruments to be published to the market in as close to real time as possible. It enriches and normalises trade data that must be sent to Approved Publication Arrangements (APAs) and includes smart reporting routing logic to select which APAs reports should be sent to as some will cover only subsets of MiFID II instruments.
Richard Bentley, chief product officer at Ullink, explains: “The MiFID II regime needs centralised reporting across reporting venues that manages reporting independently of asset class and front-office systems. We have extracted our MiFID I reporting capability from our order management system (OMS) and developed a trade reporting solution that is independent of other systems and uses FIX drop copy to gather information from vendor or in-house OMS systems for reporting.”
The company has added support to UL Trade Reporting for connectivity to the TRADEcho and Deutsche Borse APAs in the first instance and is working to add Euronext and Bats, along with other registered APAs, through the year. UL Trade Reporting is available immediately as a managed service or enterprise solution.
Bentley expects the trade reporting solution to find favour among the company’s 200 customers in Europe already using its products and says it is working with many to help them get ready for MiFID II compliance on 3 January 2018. On potential new clients, he comments: “The impact of MiFID II means many firms using internal solutions are worried about being ready in time and are looking at vendor solutions to support some areas of the regulation.”
Ullink has spent the past nine months ensuring that its existing connectivity and trading products are MiFID II ready, and is working on additional solutions. Bentley says: “We have identified adjacent spaces to our products where clients need new solutions and have product extensions in the pipeline.”
These products include a post-trade data management solution and a product that will support SIs’ obligations around pre-trade quote transparency. The post-trade data management solution will provide a comprehensive, chronological account of all that has happened to a client order by gathering data from all systems that touch the order and creating a trade biography. Like UL Trade Reporting, the product will be open and able to gather data from all relevant vendor and internal systems. Bentley says its key use will be to satisfy the audit and record keeping requirements of MiFID II, although it will also be useful to best execution and market abuse analysis.
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