Fidessa has signed a distribution partnership with BNP Paribas to make its GT platform available to the bank’s institutional clients. Under the agreement, BNP will distribute Fidessa’s futures and options order management system as part of as Cortex Listed institutional trading platform to buy-side clients across all regions.
The partnership results from increasing demand from the bank’s institutional clients for more specialised execution services. Cortex Listed will provide access to global markets, synthetic order types, benchmark algorithms, order analytics and advanced spread trading.
Through the new arrangement, BNP’s buy-side clients will now have access to cloud-hosted execution capabilities, with greater connectivity both to sell-side brokers and execution venues. As Russel Thornton, Head of Business Development at Fidessa says, the workstation “provides connectivity to both the broker community to receive electronic client flow, as well as providing connectivity to the exchanges globally.”
Cortex Listed will provide a multi-broker service for those clients who execute with multiple brokers. According to Jason Stipe, Global Product Manager at BNP Paribas: “Not all clients will mandate a single executing broker and for those clients that execute with multiple brokers, the GT platform will enable them to leverage Fidessa’s functionality and provide BNP Paribas with the ability to service our clients.” The agreement relates exclusively to Fidessa’s derivatives solution, with no application to other asset classes expected to follow.
Fidessa entered a similar agreement in December of last year with RJ O’Brien, allowing the independent futures broker to distribute its platform for best execution compliance with MiFID II reforms. BNP Paribas was already a Fidessa client, having previously implemented the GT platform in 2016 for its global futures and options trading operations in Chicago, London and Hong Kong.
Gael Pottiez, Global Head of Product Development, Derivatives Execution and Clearing at BNP Paribas, commented: “We believe that leveraging Fidessa technology for our Cortex Listed platform reflects the future direction of the marketplace because it combines advanced trading and order analytics in a highly robust platform to deliver a powerful futures trading experience”.
The partnership with BNP Paribas comes while ION Investment Group is in the process of buying Fidessa in a deal worth £1.5bn agreed in April.
