Symphony, the Wall Street-backed secure messaging platform first designed to displace Bloomberg LP’s most ubiquitous feature and further reduce the Street’s dependency and technology costs synonymous with having a Bloomberg terminal, has struck another blow in the bow of Bloomberg’s boat thanks to the consortium-owned deal with electronic execution system provider FlexTrade.
If not widely known outside the world of trading systems vendors, EMS provider FlexTrade does have a global footprint and is utilized by buy-side managers as well as sell-side brokers, but when compared to Bloomberg’s terminal farm of nearly 300,000 subscribers, it is otherwise a minnow compared to Bloomberg’s being a whale in the ocean of institutional electronic execution offerings. That said, the news below from FlexTrade, in which they have just merged order management functionality with Symphony’s messaging applications is likely to cause Mike Bloomberg spending more than 15 minutes thinking about the ramifications of below story while flying his private jet down to the Bahamas this weekend. The story headline from Markets Media may be dry to some, but for those following Symphony’s encroachment, it is wetting the mouths of sharks.
(Markets Media) FlexTrade Automates Blotter Communication
Execution-management system provider FlexTrade has integrated Symphony’s secure messaging platform with its trading platform.
“The integration lets clients communicate directly from their trading blotter over Symphony in a secure and compliant way,” said Andy Mahoney, director of business development for FlexTrade UK.
Driving the integration was a sea change in traders’ behavior across the Americas, Europe and Asia that FlexTrade noticed, according to Mahoney.
“People want to be able to communicate from their blotters,” he said. “Obviously, integrating Symphony into the FlexTrade platform is the next step in that.”
FlexTrade clients are free to decided how they wish integrate Symphony into their current workflow.
Some of the basic capabilities include firing off automated messages if a specific set of criteria is met.
“For example, if brokers fill your orders outside the spread, clients can trigger a message asking the brokers why they filled the order outside of the spread,” said Mahoney. “Or if you get a lit execution on a dark algo, it also can trigger an automated message to the broker.”
FlexTrade also plans to add the ability to search for information and research on specific issues from the blotter, capture conversations in the platform’s FlexTCA transaction-cost analysis tool as well as support fixed-income liquidity discovery, inventory distribution and price negotiation in the coming months.
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