Electronic trading support product of the year: TransFICC

TransFICC’s One API and automation solutions earned the Electronic trading support product of the year award by tackling fragmentation and streamlining workflows in fixed income and derivatives markets. This achievement highlights the company’s practical solutions for addressing some of the core challenges faced by participants in these markets, particularly regarding connectivity and automation.

The fragmented nature of the fixed income and derivatives markets presents a significant challenge to financial institutions. With nearly 200 global execution venues, each with unique application programming interfaces (APIs) and workflows, banks and asset managers face a considerable burden in maintaining integrations. TransFICC’s One API tackles this issue by providing a unified integration point that translates multiple-venue APIs into a single consistent interface.

This approach reduces the time and cost associated with connecting to and maintaining individual APIs, enabling institutions to streamline their operations and focus on trading activities. The platform’s low-latency architecture ensures it can handle the high-speed price updates required in volatile markets, while microsecond-level timestamping supports regulatory requirements around best execution.

In the past year, TransFICC has extended its services to include TransACT, an automated execution solution designed for credit and interest rate swap trades. Smaller trades often present an operational challenge for banks, but TransACT automates request-for-quote workflows, allowing these transactions to be handled efficiently without requiring additional resources.

The company has also developed an e-trading platform for credit markets that integrates a user-friendly interface with low-latency connectivity and pricing engine workflows. This platform was built in response to client demand for more effective tools to manage manual trading workflows and to improve overall trading efficiency.

TransFICC’s focus on automation is complemented by its work on a consolidated tape for fixed income markets, which is currently in pilot testing. A consolidated tape provider will be selected by the European Securities and Markets Authority in the European Union and the Financial Conduct Authority in the UK, with the aim of enhancing transparency by aggregating trading data and providing a unified view of market activity. This solution is expected to support pre-trade analytics, compliance efforts and regulatory requirements as transparency becomes a higher priority for market participants and regulators.

TransFICC’s technology is notable for its scalability and reliability. The company employs open-source tools, such as Aeron for messaging and simple binary encoding for data processing, to deliver high-performance solutions. With its own points-of-presence servers located in major financial hubs, TransFICC provides clients with low‑latency connectivity and robust disaster recovery capabilities.

The firm’s agile development practices, including continuous delivery and extreme programming, allow it to update its software frequently and respond quickly to client feedback. This approach ensures its solutions remain adaptable to the changing needs of the market.

Judges praised TransFICC’s ability to address key challenges in electronic trading, citing the practical benefits of its products and the company’s steady growth.

By addressing long-standing issues in connectivity and automation, TransFICC has become an important service provider for the fixed income and derivatives markets. Its solutions are designed to improve efficiency and transparency while helping clients meet the demands of a highly fragmented and regulated market. This award reflects the company’s ongoing efforts to deliver meaningful innovations to its clients.

Judges said:

• “Clear momentum at the vendor, with impressive product launches like TransACT and e-trading for credit, which deliver significant market benefits.”
• “TransFICC solves a very real problem for FICC players that lack the resources for one-by-one connectivity to venues.”
• “The company’s expanding connectivity and addition of major clients beyond its initial backers illustrate its growing impact on the market.”
• “Good growth in product capabilities and client adoption, backed by solid post-implementation support.”

Steve Toland, co-founder of TransFICC, says:

“Driven by increased electronification, new trading workflows, market fragmentation and new entrants, the fixed income market is evolving at speed. All trading firms are looking to access liquidity and market data, automate complex trading workflows, expand distribution and reduce costs. TransFICC is working with 15 banks, four buy-side firms and three exchange groups, helping them to address these issues.”

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