Instinet Europe Limited (“Instinet”) announced the European launch of BlockCross®, a workflow solution for managing block trading in securities. BlockCross will enable traders to route a variety of conditional, block-size orders to Instinet’s European multilateral trading facility, BlockMatch.
The European rollout follows Instinet’s acquisition of BlockCross for US stock trading in 2017 and allows European and US clients to trade both US and European securities. The success of the crossing platform, which includes a unique ‘blotter scraping’ functionality to optimize interaction with a client’s order blotter, led Instinet to adapt BlockCross for trading European stocks. This first phase of the rollout will enable clients the opportunity to seek block liquidity in European securities, while minimizing risks of information leakage. Instinet intends to further expand the BlockCross concept on a global basis.
Ralston Roberts, Global CEO of Instinet, said: “Instinet’s role as an agency-model broker is to connect our clients to the widest possible variety of opportunities for quality liquidity. BlockCross will give our clients more chances to efficiently execute block-like trades, while still affording them the ability to manage information leakage.”
Richard Parsons, CEO of Instinet Europe Limited, said: “BlockCross gives our clients a convenient dashboard for managing orders with a variety of conditional behavioral alternatives. They can set orders to operate on an auto-ex basis, or via pop-up, which enables the trader to confirm block trading opportunities as they arise. They can even activate RFQ or algo strategies, and manage their potential counterparties and venues.”
BlockCross is integrated with third party OMS and EMS platform providers, as well as Instinet’s Newport® EMS. Clients may also access BlockCross through Instinet’s trading algorithms, or via a direct FIX connection. The small, nimble graphic user interface (“GUI”) can be configured to trigger a variety of pop-up alerts or simply operate in the background on automated execution instructions set by the user. This greatly streamlines workflow and minimizes the footprint on a trader’s desktop.
