The TRADE 77 - Q3 2023 | Page 25

“ When I first started trading , I would be picking up the phone and asking people for prices . The best I had to go by would be maybe where I last traded a bond and then potentially some information on Bloomberg .” more limited number of liquidity providers . One way of doing this is by using an execution management system ( EMS ). EMS are as widely adopted in fixed income as they are in equities , namely because the systems have not typically lent themselves to buy-side workflows , particularly with regards to bonds . However , in the pursuit of better liquidity from new sources , Ruffles explains , direct connectivity could spark increased appetite for EMS from the buy-side .
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incumbents are better positioned to fill those gaps , highlighting the difficulty of breaking into this space .”
Also set to potentially disrupt the incumbent execution landscape is the prospect of direct connectivity - whereby buy-side shops develop direct pipes with a
“ When I first started trading , I would be picking up the phone and asking people for prices . The best I had to go by would be maybe where I last traded a bond and then potentially some information on Bloomberg .” more limited number of liquidity providers . One way of doing this is by using an execution management system ( EMS ). EMS are as widely adopted in fixed income as they are in equities , namely because the systems have not typically lent themselves to buy-side workflows , particularly with regards to bonds . However , in the pursuit of better liquidity from new sources , Ruffles explains , direct connectivity could spark increased appetite for EMS from the buy-side .
“ At the moment , RFQ is a standardised protocol and that ' s useful for all of these platforms but as we try to address liquidity in different ways we will be looking for different protocols ,” explains Ruffles .
“ That might be direct connectivity to some of our banks and in which case that can be quite burdensome for the order management system ( OMS ). That might be a situation where you would look to use an EMS to give you that connectivity so that you ' re not slowing down your OMS by putting lots of different connections in . You want it to be robust and speedy but equally you might want those connections to go out of the door in a different way directly to the bank .”
The most poignant technological evolution to have hit the fixed income market in recent years is the introduction of datadriven composite pricing available on trading platforms ,
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