The way that Daniel Nehren sees it, all trading desktops will be web-based within five years, where they’ll be an assembly of external and internal applications, integrated to provide a “best-in-class” trading environment.

Nehren, head of statistical modeling and development for equities at Barclays, says that historically, the trading desktop has been separated into two pieces: the high-performance trading platform, and the analytics applications built around that. Disjointed and siloed, the challenge was getting the trader useful information at the moment that they needed it. 

“Historically, these two use-cases were completely separately treated. So there was an external portal for clients that would have capabilities like intra-trade, post-trade, pre-trade analytics; and then internally, the traders used in-house UIs [user interfaces] and would get the analytics from a completely different pipeline, and it was usually quite a limited number of analytics that they were able to see,” Nehren tells WatersTechnology. “So the vision that we came up with is we want to drive all the analytics and this content in one single way, and then distribute that to our internal desks, as well as our clients, in a unified way.”

To adjust to this changing environment, Barclays has set out to revamp its BARX single-dealer, cross-asset electronic trading platform using the OpenFin operating system. “These technologies play an important role in scaling our ability to deliver BARX insights,” Nas Al-Khudairi, global head of electronic and digital for Barclays Markets, tells WatersTechnology. “We are reimagining algorithmic trading with design concepts that yield more flexibility and dynamism to cater for the market structure requirements of today and the future.”

The aim of the project, says Ying Cao, Barclays Markets’ head of digital product, is to be able to offer new features that are essentially embedded within the legacy technologies underpinning BARX, and to create a build-once-deploy-anywhere model.

She says that the buy side began to look at the single-dealer platform differently in that they wanted access to information in different ways. Single-dealer platforms tend to be big and bulky, and they require users to choose how and where to access information. Integrated analytics was—and is—a challenge.

“As electronic trading platforms continue to evolve, at Barclays, we see some critical components becoming increasingly important, such as clients’ ability to access our APIs directly, interoperability so that clients can access multiple applications quickly and easily, and their ability to use new digital tools, such as AI-powered alerts and chatbots,” Cao says.

A New Beginning

Adam Toms, CEO of OpenFin Europe, says that as firms look to incorporate more diverse datasets, that information needs to be delivered in a manner that is easily consumable by traders who need that information at a particular point in time.

“I can’t stress enough the importance of getting the data insight at the right point in the workflow,” Toms says. “When applications operate in a distinctly siloed manner, it creates unnecessary friction, whether it’s navigational issues, or loss of concentration, or loss of awareness of other tools that are available to you on the desktop.”

Barclays first worked with OpenFin about three years ago to develop an application for its credit trading team, and later made a strategic investment in the vendor. For the project to revamp BARX—which began last year—Barclays has deployed the OpenFin container around BARX.

The new way of developing is to deliver a suite of ‘small apps’ that can talk to each other with interoperable features, alerts, chatbots, and which focus on the end users

Ying Cao, Barclays

Within the container are proprietary analytics along with third-party applications. The benefits are that the apps can communicate with the trading platform and provide real-time information that feeds into a single browser, rather than a trader having to go to different tabs and apps, stitching information together.

Nehren says this is important because you can change data from being displayed in existing UIs to web-driven applications that are onboarded onto the OpenFin operating system. So, for example, if a trader right-clicks on an order to see a particular chart, that information is delivered right there, rather than a trader looking at two different windows and visually piecing those analytics together.

“Once the application is developed on OpenFin, we don’t have to package any new or updated GUIs. We can simply add new features and analytics to our application, which sits in OpenFin, and our internal traders get to see it immediately,” Nehren says. “Also, the same thing can happen for our clients, who have OMSes and EMSes that are OpenFin-compliant or enabled. So clients can integrate their EMS with our analytics, and when the client touches the orders on their screen, they can drive our application and get the right content. That’s something that essentially could not be done in this way previously.”

In the past, when the bank would build new features and analytics on BARX, there was a significant infrastructure development work involved, Cao adds. There were rolling releases; there was a packaging and deployment component, which can take months internally (and longer than that for external clients); and there’s that user experience component where external traders would still have to retype information from webpage to webpage.

With OpenFin, these three issues are solved for, she says.

Additionally, Nehren says that this allows them to “fail fast” because they can try out new analytics applications, and if they don’t work or the trader doesn’t use them, then only a few days of work was wasted. Previously, he says, many of those experimental projects wouldn’t get funding because the ROI was not worth the effort.

“Before, you wouldn’t even try to fund a project like that because it was too expensive and would take too long, and oftentimes when they would deliver the tool, it wouldn’t work,” Nehren says.

Story continues after BOX.

Today, the OpenFin solution is in production for Barclays’ internal equities traders. The team is also building a “complete spectrum” of analytics around pre-, post-, and intra-trade analytics, where internal traders will provide feedback to create a robust package of analytics that can then be delivered to users.

At the same time, the bank is in the process of relaunching its “next-generation web portal,” which is built using a microservices-based architecture where clients can get analytics straight from the portal, and they can also directly interact with other Barclays products. So, for example, if a client sees that an algorithm is not working, they could potentially change its parameters on the fly directly from Barclays’ web application or chatbot.

“I hope that we are moving away from these 1,400-column tables that use old widgets, toward a much more subtle way where the trader’s mindset is embedded into the UI,” where it’s not that the trader that needs to translate that into a computer widget, but that the widget needs to behave like—and look intuitive to—the trader, Nehren says. “That’s an important mind shift that has a lot of potential.”

After getting internal feedback, the bank will start onboarding buy-side clients onto the enhanced BARX platform. While there isn’t an exact timeline set for the client rollout, Nehren says they hope to be “well into” the project by the end of 2020.