Fidessa Launches Global Direct Liquidity Access Service

With brokers sponsoring low-touch trading for their correspondents and buy-side clients, Fidessa (Booth # 3400) announced the U.S. launch of a global direct liquidity access (DLA) service at the SIFMA show. Fidessa Global DLA offers enhanced risk management and client monitoring capabilities.

The DLA offering will offer direct-market access across all exchanges and all markets worldwide, according to Martin Hakker, EVP Marketing at Fidessa."It's a service in its own right that will be offered globally but initially in the U.S., says Hakker. "It will have different bits of functionality for the buy side and the sell side," he adds.

The move rounds out Fidessa's product line. "We've always been in the high-touch space and then in the low-touch space with BlueBox (for algorithmic trading)," says Hakker. "And now we're moving into the no-touch services with Fidessa Global DLA Service," he explains.

The DLA service is for brokers offering sponsored access to the buy-side or to sell-side correspondents, either through the Fidessa workstation or through a direct connection. A buy-side firm could be accessing the global DLA service through an OMS or another buy-side system.

The DLA service comes with an enhanced risk management interface with new client monitoring features. "We're going to allow the sponsoring broker to aggregate all order flow across their clients to see what is going on here from a risk perspective," says Hakker. Real-time limits can be set to monitor clients at a firm level, a user level and at a group or position level. The sponsoring sell-side can set and adjust thresholds at the exchange level or position level or dollar cost level, says Hakker.

Fidessa saw a need to take risk management to a new level, says Hakker. The new client monitoring features allow broker-dealers to dynamically change the limits, or to monitor risk at a group level or aggregate risk across multi-firm levels.

Up until this change, risk management used to sit within the broker workstation, but now it sits on both sides, so that buy-side clients can monitor their P&L and risk, too. Through the Fidessa EMS, buy-side firms can monitor their risk at the user level, see their positions and monitor P&L.

Fidessa is going into acceptance testing for the Global DLA service with its first sell-side clients and expects to go live in the next month or two, notes Hakker. Ivy is Editor-at-Large for Advanced Trading and Wall Street & Technology. Ivy is responsible for writing in-depth feature articles, daily blogs and news articles with a focus on automated trading in the capital markets. As an industry expert, Ivy has reported on a myriad ... View Full Bio