[ S U R V E Y
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E X E C U T I O N
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S Y S T E M S ]
Virtu Financial (Formerly ITG)
S
hortly before closing its $1billion acquisition of
ITG in March this year, Virtu made clear that
it would not be completely absorbing the agency
brokerage’s client-facing businesses or brand name,
a move designed to minimise disruption and ensure
that the historic work done to build ITG’s reputation
would not be dismissed. ITG is another firm that
has been a staple of the EMS survey over the years,
thanks to its Triton platform, which now sits within
the Virtu Financial portfolio. This year’s survey will
come too soon to judge how the Triton asset manage-
ment user base will have reacted to the changes, but
Virtu will have every reason to be pleased with its
showing in this edition of the EMS survey.
Virtu was one of the top performers in this year’s
survey, although it might be more accurate to rec-
ognise that ITG would still have been the operator
of Triton for most of the past 12 months. The firm
recorded an average score of 6.28, far above the sur-
vey average of 5.78 and a year-on-year improvement
of 0.29, enough to rank second among the profiled
providers in this year’s survey. Virtu recorded the
highest score of all profiled providers in five of the
13 functional categories reviewed: client service
personnel (6.70), ease of use (6.36), breadth of broker
algorithms (6.50), timeliness of updates for broker
changes (6.27) and ease of integration to internal
systems (6.22).
There were just two areas where buy-side respon-
dents scored Virtu below 6.0 – handling of new
versions/releases (5.95) and breadth of asset class
coverage (5.86), while it’s score of 6.70 in the client
services personnel category was very close to a
‘perfect’ score of 7.0. Virtu was also one of just two
profiled providers that recorded increased year-on-
year scores compared to last year’s survey, record-
ing steady increases of between 0.2-0.4 across all
categories. Only time will tell how the Triton EMS
will evolve under Virtu’s stewardship but a prudent
course of action, for a product that has been a main-
stay of front-office trading for many years, will be to
simply let it continue to do its job.
VIRTU FINANCIAL RATINGS FOR EMS PERFORMANCE
Reliability and
Availability Latency Client Service
Personnel Ease-of-
Use Handling of New
Versions/Releases Breadth of Broker
Algorithms Timeliness of Updates
for Broker Changes FIX Capabilities
6.52 6.25 6.70 6.36 5.95 6.50 6.27 6.51
Breadth of Asset Class
Coverage Breadth of Direct
Connections to Venues Product
Development Ease of Integration to
Internal Systems Overall Cost of Operation Average score
5.86 6.27 5.92 6.22 6.29 6.28
KEY STATS
+0.41 6.70 5.86 80%
Best year-on-year score
(Breadth of asset
class coverage) Highest score
(Client service
personnel) Lowest score
(Breadth of asset
class coverage) Most important EMS
feature: Ease of use
Issue 61 // TheTradeNews.com // 93