STP/FIX

Great East London were brought in to oversee the expansion of the Client Connectivity Infrastructure of a major US investment bank.

This infrastructure allows buy-side client organisations, such as brokers and fund managers, to electronically send orders directly to the bank's trading desks.

The clients are connected to the bank by telecoms links, over which real-time trading messages are exchanged using the industry-standard FIX protocol.

In the first phase, Great East London oversaw the onboarding of new clients, helping them to resolve issues with networks, encryption, and bugs in their protocol stacks.

In the second phase, Great East London rolled out an order-routing system, allowing the bank to route client orders strategically to a variety of end-points, including a number of desks and trading systems.

Intelligence within the order routing system allowed decisions to be made automatically, so, for example, a large trade could be sent to the Cash desk for strategic handling, whereas a small trade could be sent to Direct Market Access.

Further end-points were then integrated, with routing logic to support Program Trading, Futures & Options, and client-selected algorithmic trading (such as VWAP).

Finally, support for 'Indications of Interest' and 'Trade Advertisements' were added, allowing the bank to disseminate trade capture information to its clients, and so enhance liquidity.

In the space of 2 years, system coverage was increased by 2000%, providing 40% of the equities volume within the bank.

The introduction of order routing increased the range of execution strategies available, whilst simultaneously lowering order handling costs.

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