More evidence this week of the growing importance of post-trade capabilities, as trading system provider Calypso Technology teams with electronic trading platform supplier List, and trading and connectivity specialist Ullink hooks up with order and execution management systems (OEMS) vendor Enfusion. Driven in part by regulatory requirements, among them MiFID II’s record-keeping obligations and the shift to T+2 settlement, the developments appear to herald the return of – dare we mention its name? – straight-through-processing, better known as STP.
First up were Calypso and LIST, which this week launched the integration of Lists’s set of execution and compliance capabilities with Calypso’s front to back trading platform. The catalyst for the development was an undisclosed “major European bank”, which has hired the two companies to implement “a MiFID II compliant Enterprise Platform – covering Record Keeping, Monitoring and Reporting – and transforming the voice-based, Fixed Income OTC business of the bank into a fully digitised workflow,” according to a press statement.
The arrangement, providing MiFID II compliance as well as enhanced trading and risk management with cloud-based availability, represents “an end-to-end digitisation of the trading process [which] is essential to risk management, compliance and cost efficiency,” according to Philippe Carrel, Chief Alliance Officer at Calypso.
Meanwhile, Ullink and Enfusion announced they had added access to Ullink’s Nyfix post-trade allocations and confirmation/affirmations network for users of Enfusion’s Integráta buy-side OEMS. Through an extension of Integráta, clients can use Nyfix to send allocation instructions and automatically match broker confirmations in near real time – seamlessly catching errors and inhibiting costly trade breaks.
The two companies say: “The new solution also gives Integráta users fully integrated Straight-Through-Processing (STP) across asset classes, applicable to both domestic and international trade flows.”
Enfusion president Jason Morris cites the move to T+2 settlement later this year for US equities and the “general shrinking of settlement windows world-wide” as primary drivers for the initiative.
Ullink’s global business development manager, Philippe Carré, added: “Based on analysis of our own message traffic, the usage of FIX for allocation and post-trade workflows is becoming widespread. The flexibility of our Nyfix network to support all FIX message types across all common FIX versions and asset classes is key to our growth in this area, and we expect that growth to accelerate as more firms move to FIX to automate their post-trade processes.”
