BNY Unit Forms Trading Tool Venture

NEW YORK—BNY Securities Group, a unit of the Bank of New York, has formed a new group intended to speed the development of next-generation trading tools and technology.

The initiative, dubbed Financial Engineering and Advanced Trading Solution (Feats), is intended for institutional clients of BNY Brokerage and Pershing. Both are members of BNY Securities Group and Bank of New York subsidiaries.

The venture will be headed by Gary Ardell, director and head of Feats. BNY has hired 15 new quantitative analysts, programmers and IT specialists to work on Feats.

"To succeed today, great traders require great trading tools. Our mandate is to use the most advanced trading science, engineering and information systems technology to create those tools," Ardell says. "Our clients should know that we are creating tools designed to pull fragmented liquidity back together for them."

To start, Feats will focus on developing customized algorithms, program trading capabilities and pre- and post-trade analytics, BNY says. But staffers will also look to users of BNY's Direct Execution Services (DEx) and Sonic programs to meet liquidity challenges.

Sonic is DEx's single stock, direct market access (DMA) interface, and DEx is BNY's electronic platform. In January, the brokerage arm promoted two of its executives, Derek Morris and Ana Burke, so they could focus more on the DEx service (DWT, Jan. 30).

In addition, Feats will assist clients struggling with market structure changes arising from impending regulatory reforms such as Regulation NMS in the U.S. and Mifid in the U.K., BNY says.

"This unit demonstrates our focus on utilizing the most advanced technology to achieve best execution in the rapidly evolving, global trading environment," says Joseph M. Velli, senior executive vice president of the Bank of New York and head of BNY Securities Group. "We are committed to remaining ahead of the curve technologically as our clients prepare for a post-Reg NMS world."

BNY Brokerage announced last month that it has integrated its algorithmic trading tools with Bloomberg's Professional terminal service (DWT, Feb. 27).