FlexTrade Taps Corvil for Network Analytics

The New York-headquartered FlexTrade has taken Corvil’s analytics platform to monitor and improve the visibility of client experience and infrastructure performance.

The analytics functionality layer is plugged into FlexTrade’s internal system to detect and analyze issues or anomalies across a network of brokers, asset managers, liquidity providers and banks. Integrated into FlexTrade’s connectivity channels, Corvil’s technology creates a detailed map of the network, designed to discover performance issues, such as latencies, technical glitches, transmission failures, and client service problems.

Graham Collier, FlexTrade’s head of infrastructure, explains that technical teams will be able to visualize, monitor and refine dashboard functionality based on an overview of what is needed, and allow technical teams to proactively tackle specific client issues on the network, faster.

“A lot of other tools in this space require manual configuration for setting up, and given how large our network piece is, that is a lot of work,” says Collier. “We were able to allow Corvil to discover our network and then from that refine the dashboard according to business functions so that our network could see at a very low level if there is any connectivity latency to a client or broker, how that is affecting trading, and create more trading-focused dashboards that work at the next level up.”

The analytics are expected to enable FlexTrade to become more efficient when it comes to resolving issues, improve their technology capabilities, and deliver better customer services. On the front-end, teams will have a forensic overview of the network that will allow them to directly link faults in the infrastructure to a client’s trading performance. David Murray, chief marketing and business development officer at Corvil, explains that users will have access to the analytics via a web browser and they will be able to dig down into the finer details of the performance issue by clicking on a points system display. 

“Through the Corvil user interface, they are able to see details all the way down to the birth of activity that might happen in a fraction of a second,” adds Murray. “They would see the performance across each of their connectivity points and see it across their set of customers to understand which customers are experiencing what.”

The implementation is part of a phased approach for FlexTrade to improve its ability to manage more client-specific issues using integrated analytics of its technology infrastructure. Months from now, the trading firm expects to expand the level of visibility of the network to various teams in client services, support and account management to help them to directly contact and assist client firms with their problems. At a later stage, FlexTrade intends to explore how the enhanced visibility and monitoring infrastructure could be used to bolster their security capabilities going forward.

“We are [making] a big investment in security at the moment,” says FlexTrade’s Collier. “So we would like to eventually see how it ties into that because obviously at a network level, we were able to see what was going on.”