OTC Platforms Go Live

Sky Road’s Swap Trader operational at Eris Exchange.



The transformation of the OTC swaps market has given rise to a new class of trading applications that enables traders to risk manage portfolios and serves as a hub for centralization and reporting of trading activity both internally and externally.



Sky Road, a cloud-based solutions provider to the financial services, earlier this year launched a hosted solution blending execution, order management, and portfolio management for fixed income products.



Swap Trader is the first application announced on Motion, Sky Road’s groundbreaking platform for the creation of trading apps.



“Swap Trader allows trading firms to access, execute, and manage their trading portfolios across the rates complex, including both listed and OTC instruments, and to do so in a manner that gets firms up and running in a rapid and cost effective manner,” Eiman Abdelmoneim, principal, at Sky Road, told Markets Media.



Swap Trader is currently integrated with various derivatives exchanges, including the Eris SwapBook platform and IDCG.



Sky Road has been an early adopter in connecting to the Eris exchange and has been the only technology vendor to participate in Eris mock trading sessions, Abdelmoneim said. Sky Road and Eris co-marketed a demo of Swap Trader at this year’s FIA in Chicago.



“Execution venues will proliferate and when that happens, market participants will need tools that will help them find the best place to execute their trading strategies,” said Abdelmoneim. “They will need a solution that has the breadth of connectivity to these venues combined with a platform that can quickly and correctly price these assets.”



Swap Trader provides a central repository for trades, intraday P&L views, risk views, and connectivity to execution venues, prime brokers and fund administrators. “It supports execution and order management for the new breed of centrally cleared OTC derivatives, along with the traditional listed rates instruments,” said Abdelmoneim.



Swap Trader was developed following a number of discussions with market participants across the industry – traders on the buy-side, brokers, and FCMs.



“We recognized a clear gap in the market place for a cloud-based application that would enable trading firms to get the access they needed in a changing OTC derivatives market environment,” said Abdelmoneim.



Sky Road clients, ranging from startup hedge funds to large multi-strategy asset managers, include trading firms, whose strategies rely on the real-time processing and analysis of an ever increasing volume of order flow, and market data, while ensuring that portfolio information is communicated in a timely fashion with their trading partners.



Sky Road has embedded Panopticon’s data visualization tools into its Motion platform. Panopticon enables customers to monitor their portfolios in a visual manner that enables them to pinpoint sensitivities, performance, and risk quickly and in an actionable manner.