Jamie Benincasa is a senior vice president at Flextrade
What were the major themes in your business in 2015?
There were three major themes that we saw in 2015. I would describe the first as introducing efficiencies into institutional FX work flows by providing transparency, streaming liquidity, trading tactics, and post-trade processing capabilities (including allocations) with real-time and historical transaction-cost analysis (TCA).
Secondly, there have been a great advancements in EMS capabilities for equities and derivatives. We’ve also added support for Fixed Income, and continuing improvement in foreign exchange has been a major priority.
Finally, the institutional investor and hedge fund communities have begun to expect TCA reports to be available at a click of a button. They also want these reports to include the trade’s execution destination, its performance compared to a range of benchmarks, and the broker’s ranking based on its algo performance.
What are your expectations for 2016?
Looking forward, I see the demand for FX support only growing. I expect that more complex multi-asset requirements will be necessary because of improved multi-asset trading capabilities. These improvements will lead to arbitrage opportunities in very distinct instruments for traders and portfolio managers and they will need some way to track the spread and performance of these instruments. This will be done in the EMS.
Also, there will be a greater move towards active trade management by hedge funds. And they will need tools that will monitor their risk, exposure and cash balances across the globe for those accounts.