In other news, Bridge Alternative hires from Apex, SS&C & State Street, CQG One debuts, and Bloomberg Bridge launches.
Charles River IMS Uses LTX to Bolster Bond Trading
LTX, an A.I.-enabled corporate bond trading platform from Broadridge Financial Solutions, has been integrated with an established offering — the Investment Management Solution (IMS) from Charles River — in order to offer end-users better liquidity aggregation and improved workflows, trade transparency, and price discovery, officials say.
The Charles River IMS, an order and execution management system (OEMS), offers portfolio and risk management, and services for trading and post-trade support, officials say. State Street owns Charles River.
The LTX platform “uses data science and its own patented trading protocol, RFX, to provide the buy side and sell side with a more complete view into pre-trade and post-trade liquidity, ultimately helping market participants facilitate natural liquidity discovery and find best execution,” according to Broadridge. LTX is “used by two dozen dealers and more than 50 asset managers.”
Bridge Alternative Taps Apex, SS&C & State Street to Grow Staff
Shane Bates
Bridge Alternative Investment Solutions, a provider of outsourced chief financial officer (CFO) and chief operations officer (COO) services, is adding to its staff roster with five senior hires while also expanding in Atlanta, Ga. — all to scale to meet client demands.
The five senior appointments are:
- Shane Bates from Apex Group and Nick Gilliam from SS&C Technologies who will join as partners;
- Adam Whitmore, formerly of State Street Corp., will join as CFO, and will lead the expansion of the group’s footprint to Atlanta;
- and Seth Ferguson and David Haire will join as directors, from regional public accounting firms and real estate ventures.
Nick Gilliam
“The war for talent is a real one and we remain extremely focused on scaling with our clients and providing unmatched opportunities,” says Kyle Fields, managing partner of Bridge Alternative Investment Solutions, in a prepared statement.
Bridge Alternative offers “virtually every function that an in-house CFO, COO and/or controller would provide, including books and records management, cash movements and controls, fee calculations and billing, audit management and coordination, tax compliance and coordination and service provider oversight and relationship management,” officials say.
CQG Debuts Cloud-based Trading Platform “CQG One”
CQG, a vendor of front-office solutions for traders, brokers, commercial hedgers and exchanges, has begun a phased rollout of its trading platform, CQG One, officials say.
With traders and institutional investors in mind, the cloud-based CQG One combines the vendor’s retail-oriented CQG Desktop platform with the “market data, charting, visualization and advanced analytics features of CQG Integrated Client,” its flagship professional trading platform.
“A multi-asset, multi-broker platform, CQG One will be available through traders’ futures commission merchants (FCMs) beginning in April, with new functionality added throughout the year,” officials say. The new system offers advanced charting, market analytics and trading functions.
“We will continuously update it through our HTML5 cloud infrastructure in a way that’s seamless to users,” says Marcus Kwan, CQG vice president, product strategy and design, in a prepared statement.
Officials add that the new platform will offer: single-click trade entry; advanced charting and analytics; portfolio sharing; window linking and drag-and-drop tabs; consolidated real-time and life-of-contract historical market data feeds from more than 75 global sources; and access to CQG Algos, a set of pre-built algorithmic order types.
New analytics features, custom formulas, price alerts and a spreader will be offered later this year. “Institutional clients will be able to utilize a Windows-installed version of CQG One in the future,” according to CQG.
Bloomberg Unveils ‘All-to-All’ Bond Trading Service
Market data and news giant Bloomberg has launched Bloomberg Bridge, a bond trading service for intermediated trading for corporate and emerging market bonds, officials say.
“Clients will be able to launch Request for Quote (RFQ) tickets for applicable securities or respond to an RFQ to seamlessly execute a trade, supported by dedicated Goldman Sachs intermediation desks,” according to Bloomberg.
The new Bloomberg Bridge is slated to “go live in Europe in Q2 2022 and subsequently in the US and APAC. Bloomberg Bridge is designed to offer users the ability to source a deep pool of liquidity from Bloomberg’s global network of institutional investors and dealer firms, which currently number over 3,700,” officials say.
All-to-all trading “allows buy-side institutions to participate in providing liquidity and also gain access to deeper liquidity,” officials say. This practice “has seen consistent growth. Recent research from Coalition Greenwich found that the use of all-to-all trading for U.S corporate bonds increased from approximately 5 percent in 2017 to 12 percent in 2020.”
The vendor hopes Bloomberg Bridge will “streamline and optimize trading workflows,” and offer clients “access to greater liquidity,” says Ben Macdonald, global head of enterprise products at Bloomberg, in a statement.
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