'EMS' Wares Bow at TradeTech Europe

PARIS—A common theme to emerge at TradeTech Europe 2005 in Paris last week was a new way for vendors to move up the value chain with platforms that access a range of electronic transaction options, helping to coin the industry’s latest three-letter acronym: the execution management system (EMS).

Royalblue, ITG and the London Stock Exchange (LSE) debuted electronic trading wares that underscore the continuing trend toward the digitization of capital markets trading. Caplin Systems will this week announce that it is also getting in the game.

For starters, Royalblue, launched its transaction-enabled Fidessa Workstation product, bringing it into the EMS space. The Fidessa Workstation offers direct market access (DMA) trading capabilities as well as trading algorithms offered by user firms such as Credit Suisse First Boston (CSFB). "We haven’t got anyone live with the flow coming in yet because we’re literally launching this week," says Simon Barnby, Fidessa’s business development manager.

The Workstation platform offers an order management workflow component that allows traders to manage inbound FIX orders together with those received via telephones. Buy-side users can integrate their order management systems (OMSes) so that the FIX output that is generated flows directly into Fidessa Workstation. "For the sell side, it’s a similar thing. Flow can come in directly via FIX from their clients," Barnby says.

The Fidessa Workstation offers connectivity to the full range of destinations available over the Fidessa network. Local brokers can also be added on demand, say Royalblue officials.

"For an execution desk, be it sell- or buy-side, we’re offering an order management tool to manage the orders across the desk with a fully integrated market data package," Barnby says. "And, we host it all, so all our clients need to do is connect through a leased line, Internet or a dedicated network provider."

ITG also announced its foray into the EMS space in Europe by bringing its Triton product from across the Atlantic. The vendor launched Triton in the U.S. just over a year ago (Trading Technology Week, March 15, 2004) and has since built up a client base of about 90 users, says Alasdair Haynes, CEO of ITG Europe.

ITG vice president Sagi Smolarski says that the platform is very easy to customize. "It’s Microsoft .Net based, so you can create your own extensions either through wizards or by writing the code yourself. For example, you can create customized order types or rules for executing certain orders," says Smolarski.

The platform is being pitched as a broker-neutral solution, allowing users to select the brokers they want to use for transaction executions. ITG Triton is also fully integrated with the other services that ITG offers. For example, the Triton platform provides access to ITG Posit, research services, trading cost analysis, and ITG Logic, which offers pre-trade and residual risk analysis, Smolarski says.

The platform has been designed to cater to the whole trading process, from pre- to post-trade. In the U.S., ITG offers customizable algorithmic trading programs and is in the process of porting those to the European market.

Finally, the London Stock Exchange (LSE) officially debuted a new version of its Proquote terminal, dubbed Proquote International, which offers access to data and news on a broad range of instrument types, including equity, fixed income, foreign exchange, commodities and derivatives from more than 100 markets around the world. The platform was built in partnership with the Swiss vendor Infotec. "[Infotec] is taking all the feeds, putting them through their ticker plant and putting together the front end for us," says LSE CIO David Lester.

Proquote International is delivered as a Web-based solution, and requires no additional client hardware, officials say. Priced at £180 ($345) per user per month, not including added exchange fees for real-time data, it is designed as a cost-effective solution for more price-conscious consumers such as second tier sell- and buy-side firms.

Although Proquote International is currently only offered as a data terminal, it will soon be transaction enabled, Lester says. Access to trading on the U.K. market should be integrated before the end of the year, with the possibility of adding trading on international markets through broker partnerships at a future date.