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FlexTrade
F
lexTrade was unable to garner enough respons-
es to merit a profile provider in last year’s EMS
survey, but has returned to its usual position among
profiled EMS providers in this year’s edition, having
received twice as many responses from asset manag-
ers in 2019’s survey. The vendor has spent much of the
previous 12 months making a series of upgrades to its
FlexTRADER and FlexNOW EMS products, focusing
on accessibility and interoperability through its work
with OpenFin, moving FlexNOW onto the Amazon
Web Services cloud platform to reduce latency and
onboarding time, as well as expanding its workflow
and automation capabilities.
However, it seems that these efforts have not
impressed buy-side respondents to this year’s EMS
survey, or not yet at least, as FlexTrade recorded a dis-
appointing showing compared to its results last year.
The vendor recorded an average score of 5.50 from
this year’s respondents, which, while still respectable
and well above the “default” score (5.00), it represents
a decrease of 0.36 from its average score in 2018 and is
one of the lowest average scores for profiled providers
this year.
Similarly, FlexTrade received a healthy set of scores
across EMS functional performance categories from
survey respondents this year, with scores exceed-
ing 5.00 in all but one category – handling of new
versions/releases (4.96), which perhaps does not
bode well for the vendor’s upgrade work this year.
FlexTrade scored highly in the reliability and avail-
ability (5.76), client service personnel (5.74), breadth
of broker algorithms (5.98), timeliness of updates for
broker changes (5.84) and FIX capabilities (5.85) cat-
egories. However, it is the year-on-year score changes
that provide a much starker view of how buy-side
users rate FlexTrade’s EMS offering, with nine of the
13 categories reviewed scoring below last year’s total,
most noticeable in for latency (-0.85), handling of new
versions/releases (-0.91), breadth of direct connec-
tions to venues (-0.74) and, most significantly, in ease
of use (0.92), an area that 64% of FlexTrade buy-side
respondents said was the most important EMS feature
for their operations.
FLEXTRADE 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
5.76 5.64 5.74 5.08 4.96 5.98 5.84 5.85
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
5.32 5.41 5.60 5.18 5.08 5.50
KEY STATS
+0.07 5.98 4.96 64%
Best year-on-year score
(FIX capabilities) Highest score
(Breadth of broker
algorithms) Lowest score
(Handling of new
versions/releases) Most important EMS
feature: Use of ease
88 // TheTrade // Fall 2019