Sell-Side Technology Awards 2015: Best Sell-Side OTC Trading Initiative ─ SmartTrade

Midway though 2012, smartTrade launched LiquidityFX, a dedicated foreign-exchange trading tool built on the back of its Liquidity Management System technology, for which it won the 2014 SST Award for the best sell-side automated trading platform. Next in line was Smart-FI, a similar module, but this time focused on the fixed-income market, launched two years later in mid-2014. 

The multi-asset trading technologies developed by smartTrade have traditionally been aimed at banks because they tend to require additional development on top of the core platform. But Smart-FI is different in that it is more of an out-of-the-box solution for financial institutions of any size wanting to trade fixed-income securities. It is designed to help user-firms reduce the time they spend integrating components and functionality, such as order routing and liquidity aggregation.

"This is the answer to where the market is going," says Annalisa Sarasini, global head of sales at smartTrade Technologies. "This kind of ready-to-market solution that reduces time to market and cuts costs is what people want, but without compromising their ability to add their own APIs and do some customization around it."

The increased digitalization of the fixed-income market means wider adoption of its underlying trading technology, which is why those different components are much needed by firms. "That's why we are proposing a new connectivity model, which is more cost effective than what people are doing today," Sarasini says. Smart-FI, available as a local installation or fully hosted, features a phased approach to automating processes by using a combination of built-in features and standard APIs, enabling market-making, price taking and a request-for-quote model, as well as other variable negotiation models.

In the near future, smartTrade will be looking to expand its instrument coverage in the fixed-income arena to address market participants' needs in the fast-changing fixed-income and OTC derivatives markets.