Leaders in Trading 2022: Meet the nominees for…. Outstanding Innovation in Fixed Income
Next up to be introduced in our Editors’ Choice awards nominees series are the four firms shortlisted for the Outstanding Innovation in Fixed Income award. As another new category for this year’s Leaders in Trading awards ceremony, this award is designed to highlight the extraordinary strides being taken in technology, operations and execution within fixed income. Up for this year’s award are AxeTrading, BondCliQ, Glimpse Markets and Wave Labs. Let’s see what they’ve been up to…
AxeTrading – fixed income trading software company for market making, quoting, bond pricing and order execution
AxeTrading has undergone a year of transformation with a whole new layer of senior leadership brought in to drive the firm’s next stage of growth. In its first move since the appointment of new chief executive officer, Greville Lucking, the technology provider expanded its suite of products to including interest rate swaps. Raiffeisen Bank International (RBI) was the first participant to execute one of the instruments on AxeTrading in August.
The firm has also integrated its pricing library for calculation of non-standard swaps in a bid to boost quoting confidence for traders. Looking further back towards the end of 2021, the firm integrated pricing data and analytics tools from the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) in a bid to help traders make more informed investment decisions.
The tools, including ICE’s evaluated pricing, continuous fixed income evaluated pricing, best execution services and liquidity indicators, are available via AxeTrading’s quoting and execution management system (QEMS).
BondCliQ – Centralised bond quote system
As Europe and the UK teeters on the precipice of implementing a consolidated tape, BondCliQ is set to continue making waves in the market this year and next. The firm offers several ways to facilitate the consumption of pre-trade institutional pricing data and post-trade TRACE data in the US.
Its quote platform encourages market makers to compete for client order flow based on customer service while it claims to offer dealers better access to pre-trade information and monetise quote data. As the industry’s first consolidated corporate bond quote system, it claims to aggregate 70,000 pre-trade bid and offer quotes on 15,000 bonds daily from more than 40 dealers.
It’s received backing from major institutions and venue operators including the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) which led a Series A funding round into it in January to support its expansion into Europe. Also, to show its support was buy-side giant Vanguard, which has formed a strategic partnership with the firm.
Glimpse Markets – buy-side data pooling network
Aimed at addressing the growing issue of rising market data costs, Glimpse Markets launched into the market earlier this year with a bang.
The post-trade data sharing network is designed to give more autonomy to the buy-side over the data accumulated through their transactions. It launched its ‘data dividend’ initiative – a system that rewards firms for their contribution of their data to the pool with a fee – in June last year and has since gained significant ground with the buy-side.
With a lack of a consolidated tape in the UK and Europe, firms are increasingly depending on disruptor initiatives such as this one to avoid soaring data costs. The data sharing network entered into a partnership with Wave Labs in April, linking to its credit trading system eLiSA ahead of its roll out due to take place this year. The two-way integration will mean that users of the eLiSA (Electronic Liquidity Seeking Application) will be able to leverage Glimpse’s European buy-side contributed trades data while also contributing to the network themselves.
The pair later extended this partnership at the end of September that will see Wave Labs provide Glimpse’s clients with access to a free web-based dashboard that will allow them to view and analyse the live and historical buy-side trade data that has been shared over the Glimpse network.
Wave Labs – eLiSA (Electronic Liquidity Seeking Application) – credit trading system
Wave Labs is the creator of eLiSA – the electronic liquidity seeking application aimed at revolutionising institutional bond trading by solving issues in fixed income that current execution management systems (EMS) do not.
Recently, Wave Labs launched an extension package, namely SIA, which is a no-code workflow automation and systematic investment toolset for fixed income.
Wave Labs started the roll out of eLiSA to its first pilot client earlier this year. It claims to offer the first technology that takes Neptune Axes and uses machine learning to predict whether a bond is mis-priced and by how much – a process that is now under way for its pilot client.
The firm also entered into a strategic partnership with Glimpse Markets – focused on complex data analysis and other trading functions including primary market trading – and also with the intention of linking it with eLiSA once launched. The partnership will see it provide a free web-based dashboard to Glimpse clients to allow them to analyse the data pooled by the network.
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