The French banking giant is extending its contract with Fidessa to leverage the vendor’s hosting and cross-asset capabilities.
BNP Paribas has gone live with a hosted, derivatives trading platform for a complex workflow of listed derivatives trading operations in Europe, Asia-Pacific and North America. Bank officials add that they expect the deployment to boost customer service via the platform’s cross-asset capabilities.
The platform from vendor Fidessa has been set up as “a fully-managed service leveraging an extensive network of hosting centers around the globe,” according to the vendor. The Fidessa system is providing BNP Paribas with market data and “high-speed access to more than 60 futures and options markets.”
The installation includes order management support, global order handover capabilities, and execution for the bank’s activities in major derivatives markets around the world, say vendor and bank officials in prepared statements. The platform includes a suite of derivatives algorithms such as those for benchmarking, and synthetic order types that “normalize trading across global markets,” officials add.
The platform also includes order analytics capabilities to enable BNP Paribas traders “to monitor orders in real time and adjust algos on the fly to provide greater precision of execution for their clients,” vendor officials say.
The platform, which supports the French bank’s futures and options agency trading business, “is fully integrated into BNP Paribas’ clearing systems,” a spokesperson for BNP Paribas tells FTF News. “This technology replaces parts of our legacy execution in-house IT infrastructure. We are using a fully-hosted vendor solution for IT infrastructure on the execution side, which connects to our internal platforms for post-trade processing.”
The deployment underscores the bank’s “more than three decades’ experience in clearing and a longstanding tradition of expertise in derivatives,” says Gael Pottiez, head of product development, derivatives execution and clearing at BNP Paribas, in a prepared statement. “We are pleased to confirm that we are fully committed to the business. We needed a platform that could support the complex and varied needs of our clients all over the world,” Pottiez says.
BNP Paribas already has an existing relationship with Fidessa “as we employ some their products in other areas of the bank,” the bank spokesperson says. “We signed the contract for this hosted platform last year.”
The bank began “a phased rollout” this past July, “which saw us add Europe, core U.S. markets, APAC and Australia — as well as additional functionality including algorithms,” the bank spokesperson says.
The new system is having an impact on many of the bank’s clients and counterparties, according to the bank.
“We trade with a number of major institutional investors, alternative asset managers and corporates across the globe — and we expect our client base to grow both in size and diversity,” the bank spokesperson says. “We think that listed derivatives are going to be a very important product going forward and our announcement today [October 17] is a key indication of the fact that we intend to be in this market for the long term.”
The bank is looking ahead to the key customer service benefits the system is expected to yield.
“We expect it to improve customer services as a result of the platform’s cross-asset capabilities,” the bank spokesperson says. “Our clients are increasingly looking at a wider range of assets and so desks are increasingly moving cross-asset. People will always have their individual specialisms but banks must be able to service clients across all asset classes. We also expect to benefit from the platform’s scalable efficiencies.”
The Fidessa derivatives trading platform “supports more than 70 clients worldwide, scaling to support everything from single user execution through to fully-integrated global order management,” according to the vendor.
Need a Reprint?