The past several months have been an exciting time for LiquidityBook. While we have long been known for our front-office trading technology, a wide range of factors have spurred us to put a greater emphasis on functionality across the trade lifecycle, including post-trade processing.
Our clients have been consistent in their demand for an all-in-one offering – they want to handle trade allocations, confirmations and affirmations via the same platform they use for other aspects of the trade lifecycle. And recent developments, such as the industry’s planned move to a T+1 settlement cycle, have only heightened the importance of having post-trade tools with the functionality, connectivity and flexibility necessary to succeed in an accelerated environment.
Enter the FIX protocol. While LiquidityBook has always offered our own proprietary managed FIX trading network as part of our OEMS offering, our recent enhancements have broadened the use cases for this connectivity to include post-trade tasks. With the resulting solution, clients can leverage the network services they already use and eliminate trade breaks via a single solution, while non-clients can use our tools on a standalone basis.
Our solution enables buy-side firms to send order allocations as FIX allocation instructions to their counterparties, while sell-side firms can use the same protocol to process allocations, create confirmations, calculate commissions and more. Clients gain the ability to customize confirmation matching rules and make affirmations or rejections on either a manual or automated basis. Both use cases foster accuracy and speed throughout the post-trade process.
Our approach to post-trade processing brings together our risk gateway, customer gateway and FIX network, which connects to over 200 broker-dealers and execution venues globally and supports equities, options, futures, FX, derivatives, swaps and more. In this way, our post-trade solutions serve as a natural extension of our preexisting capabilities.
As with all LiquidityBook solutions, our single unified code base and modular architecture offer distinct advantages on integration and flexibility. Our platform operates seamlessly alongside software from just about any other vendor and can easily be enhanced based on client requests. That means our clients gain efficiency and ultimate control over workflows, while their counterparties benefit from working with firms that have more technically advanced, cost-efficient ways to settle trades.
This is an especially powerful solution for clearing brokers, who must process and create high volumes of allocations and confirmations. With that, perhaps it’s no surprise that we are seeing momentum within this market – we just recently added a clearing broker to our client roster, and are in active talks with several others.
As we continue to innovate and enhance our platform, we look forward to sharing more examples of how FIX can combine with industry-leading functionality and cloud-based architecture to produce transformative results.
