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Instinet
W
hile its competitors and peers have embarked
upon spending sprees, furthering the consol-
idation the front-office financial technology space,
or undertook a series of public upgrades to their
EMS offerings, Instinet has, on the other hand, been
somewhat quiet in this particular arena over the past
12 months. Now in it’s 50th year, the agency broker
seems content to, for the time being at least, focus on
other areas of its business and let its EMS platform
Newport stay the course. Last year we wrote that
Instinet should be wary of complacency in a saturat-
ed EMS market, and that advice still appears to be
relevant in 2019.
As one of the mainstays of the annual EMS survey,
Instinet drew 15% more responses from buy-side
users in this year’s survey compared to last year. Hav-
ing recorded the highest average score for profiled
providers in the EMS survey for the past three years,
Instinet was unable to hold on to its crown in 2019,
receiving an average score of 6.15 from buy-side re-
spondents, outperforming the survey average (5.78).
While this represents a 0.09 improvement on its
score from the 2018 edition of the survey, the impli-
cation is that Instinet’s competitors have leapfrogged
the broker over the past 12 months.
However, Instinet should have every reason to be
pleased with its overall showing in this year’s EMS
survey. The firm recorded a score of at least 6.0 in 11
of the 13 functional categories under review, posting
the highest scores of all profiled providers in the han-
dling new versions/releases (6.27) and overall cost
of operations (6.35) categories, while also scoring
highly in the reliability and availability (6.40), client
service personnel (6.41) and FIX capabilities (6.32)
categories. The only areas in which the broker failed
to break the 6.0 score were for its breadth of asset
class coverage (5.51) and product development (5.85),
although, again, these still represent respectable
scores. There was little in the way of major varia-
tion in Instinet’s year-on-year scores, with the most
noticeable differences coming in the overall cost of
operations (+0.43) and handling of new versions/re-
leases (+0.53) categories.
INSTINET 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
6.40 6.21 6.41 6.15 6.27 6.29 6.05 6.32
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
5.51 6.13 5.85 6.06 6.35 6.15
KEY STATS
+0.53 6.41 5.51 73%
Best year-on-year score
(Handling of new
versions/releases) Highest score
(Client service
personnel) Lowest score
(Breadth of asset
class coverage) Most important EMS
feature: Ease of use
Issue 61 // TheTradeNews.com // 89