Risk Markets Technology Awards 2021: Best execution product

Pete Eggleston, BestX

Best execution product of the year: BestX

BestX has expanded its best execution governance and reporting product to include equities in addition to foreign exchange, commodities and fixed income. The multi-asset offering meets the need for a single provider that can measure costs consistently across asset classes. BestX analytics and software enable clients to codify their best execution policies and ensure they are fully implemented and monitored. 

Performance metrics include a proprietary expected cost model, allowing all aspects of best execution to be measured and monitored. Users can select the execution factors they wish to measure that are relevant to their business and the way they execute. Separate analytics layers for FX, fixed income and equities ensure accurate computation of asset class-specific metrics, but also compute common metrics, which allow a consistent aggregation of cost for multi-asset portfolios.

Pre- and post-trade functionality is linked, whereby post-trade results feed pre-trade, and results from pre-trade can be saved and viewed ex-post. Exception reporting is customisable, allowing users to define thresholds on any metric to be configured and monitored. Workflow around exception explanation and approval is also supported, with full audit trails saved.

BestX’s cloud-based technology is scalable and fast. It has extensive connectivity to liquidity providers, with more than 20 major banks feeding data to it, as well as to all the main order and execution management systems. The connections to liquidity providers allow the company to enrich data from, for example, an order management system, thereby providing clients with comprehensive analysis on all aspects of the trade.

For FX, intraday millisecond data is aggregated from over 120 liquidity providers globally, with on average 1 billion price updates stored per day. For fixed income, BestX has partnered with ICE and receives data for more than 2.5 million securities daily from its continuous evaluated pricing feed. Data is taken directly from exchanges for futures, and from Refinitiv for equities. The company also manages a community data pool of performance data for the buy side for FX and equities, with plans to extend it to fixed income.

A new ‘fill position’ metric has been added to FX algorithm analysis that provides a ranking of prices achieved by the algorithm relative to the opportunity set of prices available during the algorithm’s working time. Fixed income coverage has been expanded to include US municipal bonds and mortgage-backed securities. For commodities, coverage of post-trade has been extended to include commodity futures, together with a suite of algorithm metrics. Energy, metals and soft commodities are all supported.

Judges said:

• “BestX offers thorough product coverage, and its move into equities and fixed income, building on its FX platform, is positive.”
• “The company shows product innovation with enhanced useful diagnostics.”
• “BestX continues to grow in many significant areas, including asset classes, features and functions, clients and staff.”

Pete Eggleston, co-founder, BestX, says:

“BestX provides a fully integrated multi-asset class transaction cost analysis product, covering FX, fixed income, equities and commodities. The product serves multiple use cases, across both the sell and buy sides, effectively allowing an institution to implement and codify their best execution policy in a single platform. Configurable BestX factors, benchmarks, outlier detection and reporting support bespoke implementation. Unique analytics engines per asset class provide specific metrics per asset class, in addition to common metrics to allow aggregation across entire multi-asset portfolios. A state-of-the-art user interface provides clients with the ability to query and analyse results interactively, in addition to scheduling regular reports.”

 

Read more articles from the Risk Markets Technology Awards 2021 winners’ review

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