Advanced trading systems aren’t just for market participants anymore. A growing swath of vendors serving these financial institutions are seeking to expand their offerings with adjacent capabilities, such as order generation and execution management. The business opportunity is there, but at what cost? What does it take to create such a system? Legions of developers, long-term product roadmaps, FIX connectivity management and responsiveness to changing market conditions. This is where LiquidityBook comes in. Our API-first platform – encompassing portfolio management, order management, execution management and a managed FIX network – can take institutional fintech vendors to the next level, enabling them to rapidly onboard trading functionality via modern APIs, or embed LBX trading screens directly into their applications.
Introduction
At LiquidityBook, we pride ourselves on providing some of the most powerful, flexible and responsive trading systems in the industry. These attributes have enabled us to serve a wide range of market participants, from emerging hedge funds and institutional asset managers to agency brokers, clearing firms and outsourced trading providers.
But the use cases for our products don’t stop there. In addition to market participants themselves, we offer a wide range of efficiencies to front- and middle-office technology providers that cater to this community – in other words, our fellow vendors. By arming these firms with institutional-grade, easily embeddable functionality for trading and connectivity, LiquidityBook enables them to serve their clients in a more comprehensive manner, no matter what that looks like.
From Analytics to Trading
Let’s explore the basic use case. These providers are relied on by portfolio managers for a wide range of functions, from keeping track of positions and accessing analytics to assessing models and managing risk. The common thread is that they offer platforms that are designed to inform or prompt trading activity but contain little or no trading functionality themselves. Integrating these capabilities quickly becomes an important priority, especially amid growing client demand for straight-through processing and the desire to close the loop between analysis and execution.
To do so, firms have a few paths available to them, but most are rife with inefficiency and risk. Standing up a proprietary system is enormously difficult. For one thing, these providers usually lack the internal technology resources required to build an OEMS in-house. Even those that do have an army of developers are often better served by focusing their efforts on their core competencies in analytics, portfolio modeling, risk and so on. At the end of the day, market participants want their analytics providers to focus on innovation, testing new theories and ultimately delivering the best solutions they can. This also generally creates a philosophical conflict with delving into the nitty gritty of trading and connectivity, which requires building both technology and an organization from the ground up around real-time monitoring, support and problem resolution.
Engaging an outside consultant might appear to be a logical solution, but this too has its shortcomings: assessing the opportunity and building all-new tech is a long, expensive process, and the systems that result must be maintained and enhanced over time, creating a never-ending burden. What if a trading emergency happens, or if the system must be adapted ahead of a sweeping new rule change? Starry-eyed sales pitches aside, these builds often result in bare-bones trade blotters that perform only the most basic functions – ingesting client orders and sending them to a broker – with none of the compliance capabilities or other features that their clients need.
On the other side of the coin, there are legacy players who offer more robust functionality for trading and connectivity, but they bring their own shortcomings, from inflexible architecture and on-premise hardware to interminable timelines and opaque, unfavorable business models. For vendors that want to give their clients a streamlined, modern experience, this outmoded approach is not the answer.
The LiquidityBook Difference
That’s where we come in. The LBX platform and managed FIX network offer the power and feature-richness of an institutional-grade system, but with the easy integration of a nimble fintech and the customizability of a bespoke system. We’re bridging the gaps that have long existed between these attributes, helping the vendor community realize powerful results. This enables vendors to provide one trading solution that can both rapidly onboard new clients and scale up in complexity to meet the needs of the largest and most sophisticated firms.
Much of this is due to the fact that LBX is a modern, API-first system, with a highly modular backend that makes it easy to access needed functionality without any unnecessary overhead. LBX itself can be rapidly integrated, whether via APIs, FIX, files or by embedding LBX UI components directly into another application – or any combination thereof. From a client perspective, this can take just about any form, from fully white-labeled trading functionality that enables firms to maintain their own branding, to mutually beneficial partnerships that directly expose our clients’ customers to the power of LiquidityBook.
We deliver all of this with the performance, flexibility and client-centricity that the industry has come to expect from us.
- Our software is as robust as it is versatile, so it can be embedded to serve a wide range of needs, from WealthTech providers that want to enable portfolio rebalancing to risk systems looking to empower clients to hedge various risk factors.
- Our cloud-based model means that the frequent client-drivenenhancements we make to our platform are immediately delivered across our customer base.
- Our transparent, markup-free pricing protects our clients’ bottom line.
- And, as always, our second-to-none, award-winning client service organization is always ready to step in should anything go awry, offering a level of support beyond what most analytics providers are prepared to deliver.
It all adds up to streamlined, highly efficient experience. With LiquidityBook, vendors can not only deliver the analytics their clients need, but help those clients take the next step in the process: making trades based on their outputs. It’s a seamless process for all parties involved, meaning everyone can focus more on what they do best and hone their differentiated edge.
Want to learn more? Drop us a line.
