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which could deliver those to us . It ' s important to have straight through processing ( STP ) in place . You can route business to FlexTrade out of Charles River and execute the transactions out of that . The fills are then routed back to Charles River and then funnelled through the process chain , back-office systems and to settlement and clearing .”
In fixed income and derivatives , it ’ s a different story . After finding that the market couldn ’ t provide a system that could fulfil its needs , the asset manager developed an in-house solution on top of Charles River , making no use of an external EMS . According to Hock , designing an EMS for derivatives is an entirely different prospect as there are fewer venues to trade with than in equities where there are multiple channels and pools of liquidity .
“ When trading EuroStoxx futures or when trading bond futures you have exactly one venue where these products are traded . That ' s why an EMS in derivatives is important , but it needs to be designed in a completely different way than the one in equities or in fixed income ,” he says .
Despite championing separate best-in-class systems for each asset class , Union pools data across asset classes in one central data lake which can then be dipped into as and when needed . “ It doesn ' t make huge sense to have a data lake for each asset class . In our experience you want to have one common database
42 // TheTRADE // Winter 2021
“ We realise it so often that when queries come from a backoffice team , quite often they are ignored .” with all the trade relevant information ,” says Hock .
A token economy Union has proved itself ahead of the curve with regards to the growing token economy . Amid distributed ledger technology ( DLT ), cryptocurrencies and other digital assets , and smart contracts ’ rise to fame , the asset manager became the first of its kind on the continent to get involved in a public tokenised European Investment Bank ( EIB ) bond transaction and currently has a selected