Electronic trading support product of the year: TransFICC

TransFICC provides electronic trading support through low-latency connectivity workflow services for banks and buy-side institutions that trade fixed income and derivatives products. These comprise three main services: a consolidated application programming interface (API), a front-office e-trading platform and a consolidated tape pilot.

TransFICC’s One API service helps financial institutions connect to multiple execution venues through its own single API, saving them thousands of hours in coding, testing and managing upgrades. TransFICC can connect to trading venues faster than its competitors with a higher degree of accuracy. By reducing connectivity barriers, TransFICC’s API allows investors to access trading venues and switch venues with reduced effort and cost.

TransFICC has the speed of technology to match the frequent price updates of execution venues in this new age of volatility, allowing institutions to keep pace with high-frequency trading firms as well as regulatory controls and reporting. In particular, the solution includes a normalised price/order timestamp to the microsecond level, which provides an audit trail and allows institutions to prove best execution. TransFICC can normalise even the most complex datasets and workflows for different asset types in fixed income.

Additionally, TransFICC launched a pilot for the European Union consolidated tape. This electronic service, which collates trading data, such as price and volume, and disseminates it to investors, is built on the same data-centre hosting and normalised APIs that TransFICC already has in production.

Client demand has driven the development of an e-trading suite of services so that, in addition to trading via the API, firms can manually trade fixed income products with TransFICC.

TransFICC uses open-source components and contributes to open-source software, such as its continuous delivery dashboard. The use of an agile development framework, in addition to continuous delivery, enables TransFICC developers to write better code and run multiple levels of testing throughout the development process, while maintaining the flexibility to respond to customer challenges. 

TransFICC now offers co-location and cloud hosting. The expectation is that most banks will deploy the solution in Equinix, but TransFICC also offers a lower-cost solution in the form of Amazon Web Services for some of the buy side. TransFICC also uses Aeron technology for faster, low-latency messaging.

TransFICC’s focus on technology and innovation allowed it to support multiple trading workflows at 57 trading venues in 2022, up from 30 in 2021, including Tradeweb, Bloomberg and MarketAxess. Driven by client demand, TransFICC successfully automated more than 130 new trading and post-trade workflows on the platform in this time, adding new asset classes, including US credits, mortgages, credit default swaps, repos and collateralised loans, supporting all trade types and protocols.
 

Judges said:

• “Real innovation – in its early stages – but this is the right direction of travel.”
• “Solid endorsement from Citi.”

Steve Toland, co-founder at TransFICC, says:

“When we established TransFICC in 2016 our focus was to simplify connectivity for clients and automate often complex fixed income workflows. In 2023, fragmentation is still a significant issue faced by trading firms, but the need to expand distribution, automate trading and reduce costs are more acute. TransFICC now helps dealers in all time zones with these issues and has just added its first buy-side client.”

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