The buyside is about to see more automation come to its post-trade trade processes.
Fidessa Group announced the next phase of its post-trade strategy with the launch of an affirmation management service (AMS) for the buyside. Fidessa AMS is a new class of application that automates the workflow for direct trade affirmation between the buyside and sellside, delivering a faster, cheaper and more accurate alternative to current solutions.
The post-trade space is characterized by expensive, proprietary, outmoded technology or time-consuming, inefficient manual processes. Its lack of close integration with the rest of the business often means that important information, such as details around commission and market charge calculations, is lost too. And for many years, post-trade processing has been running flat out, with more and more manpower being used just to maintain the status quo and cover for these inefficiencies and inadequacies.
As the buy- and sell-side face shorter settlement times and new regulations are set to push this situation to breaking point, thus the need for Fidessa’s AMS. AMS provides a holistic view of the broker community in the same way that an execution management service does for order routing and execution. AMS simplifies the whole process and removes the need for multiple systems, so unifying post-trade operations to achieve levels of efficiency that have previously been unattainable.
“Larger, pioneering buyside firms have driven the use of FIX for direct post-trade processing with brokers, and it was in support of this that we launched our Post-trade Hub last year,” said Steve Grob, group strategy director at Fidessa. “However, for mass adoption to take place, most firms need a solution for the workflow involved in direct trade matching, and it was the recognition of this that led us to develop Fidessa AMS.”
AMS allows the buysides to interact directly and seamlessly over FIX with the global broker community. This direct, bilateral approach means affirmations can be processed more quickly and efficiently. Avoiding manpower-heavy manual processes or proprietary, centralized solutions, allows considerable cost savings to be made as well. The use of FIX is also beneficial as it follows the natural direction of business flow and so allows other valuable and currently lost information to persist from the front office to the back office, eliminating the need to maintain information in multiple locations and improving accuracy.
It also complements Fidessa’s existing sellside community and its FIX-based Post-trade Hub launched last year.
