Sell-Side Technology Awards 2024: Best infrastructure provider to the sell side—TransFICC

Overview

TransFICC provides low-latency connectivity and automated trading workflows for fixed-income practitioners. The market is highly fragmented, with over 200 execution venues globally, each with its own API for electronic trading. Technology must possess minimal latency as these venues can update prices more than 5,000 times per second during times of extreme volatility. With numerous complex workflows for different assets, manual trading is still a sizable part of the market, which is inefficient, limits growth, and is subject to operational errors.

The solution  

TransFICC’s One API translates venues’ unique APIs to its own single API. Clients connect once to TransFICC’s API to trade on multiple venues, saving many hours of coding, testing, and managing upgrades. TransFICC provides fast, scalable technology, allowing sell-side firms to keep pace with price updates and not be beaten on price. It also automates trading workflows for clients to increase efficiency. Trading firms benefit from streamlined technology and reduced operational costs.

Secret sauce  

TransFICC normalizes both data and workflows. Within fixed income, complex workflows exist for different asset types. TransFICC can normalize even the most complex datasets and workflows. Software is developed in-house and is designed to satisfy the demands of banks and regulators alike. This includes using open-source technologies like Simple Binary Encoding (SBE) to support fast encoding and decoding, and Aeron to support fast and reliable messaging.

Recent milestones

• IRS e-Trading is an end-to-end platform providing a UI for data analysis, trading, and post-trade. This plug-and-play service supports all IRS workflows, provides full security and disaster recovery, and is quick to deploy.
• Auto Execution automates RFQ negotiation workflows for US credit.
• The One API service has automated more than 73 new trading and post-trade workflows, and added credit default swaps (CDSs), commodities, futures, listed equities, mortgage-backed securities (MBSs), money markets, collateralized loan obligations (CLOs), and US retail bonds.

Future objectives

• TransFICC plans to add engineering staff to its current sales and pre-sales roles in New York to support the onboarding of six new clients in the region.
• The firm will launch a new credit e-trading service Q1 2024. Currently being deployed at a global bank, the service supports all credit quote and trading workflows.
• A new feature, TransACT, will launch to support auto negotiation for US credit dealer-to-client markets.

Why they won

These and other WatersTechnology awards seek to reward one quality more so than any other: innovation. TransFICC’s outstanding entry in this category exemplifies the spirit of innovation synonymous with the financial services industry and how technology and innovative thinking can meaningfully solve real-world problems for capital markets practitioners. It goes without saying that any service that streamlines workflows, enhances transparency, reduces complexity, and minimizes various operational risks is worthy of an award. But in this context, there are caveats: It must at the very least provide a single portal to the bulk of the fixed-income market’s liquidity pools and the prices it displays must be fresh and reliable. TransFICC ticks all the boxes and then some. Expect to hear a lot more from TransFiCC in the months and years ahead.