A Single Platform

SIFMA Fixed Income eTrading Survey 2008 results show 85% of buy-side respondents expect to be using a single platform for all of their institution’s wholesale electronic trading activity within the next two years.

At SIFMA we heard that the future is not all multidealer venues. Indeed, singledealer platforms are still a serious consideration for the majority of attendees where there is a functional benefit.  We also heard that buyside do actively want competition in the ECN/vendor space – if only so the functional landscape does not stagnate.

So answering the question posed in Tales from a trading desk, buyside expectation and indeed their desire would appear that the single platform in question is not one of the vendor or dealer platforms, instead it is their own desktop (ie their single platform), and that this platform is able to aggregate their view of liquidity into a single view of the market, from where they trade. So OMS or EMS depending how you measure it.

My panel ( this one of the only snippets I heard ) concluded that 2008 is back to basics and so time for the foundational work to be done so we are ready to benefit from the new venues and landscape changes that the dealer consortia are driving.   In an environment where fixed income etrading budgets are broadly the same as last year (*), we need to be specific about where the right place to spend is. So in terms of back to basics, spend your 2008 money on the implementation of your OMS and then [...through 2009] plugging it into the liquidity pools.  

Which pools do you connect to though? Well, once buyside have got the hang of plugging their OMS into fixed income liquidity pools, we’d be mad not to expect a much stronger drive from buyside and sellside to hook up direct in order to handle bespoke orderflow/information flow, or perhaps a move towards something more cross-product.  Sure, this is a relationship enhancer so perhaps only really relevant for top tier clients, but how long will critical mass of connections into say one of the fi venues want electronic order flow constrained in some way just to match what is possible via the venue’s GUI ?  Will those venues constrain the types or order that they can process, or will they move towards a more generic orderflow routing instead?  … though perhaps that’s a question for 2010 and beyond.

(*) assuming survey of SIFMA attendees is indicative of the market as a whole. The other options were that budget was materially less or materially more than 2007.