UNX Upgrades Catalyst EMS

UNX has upgraded its Catalyst Execution Management System (EMS), an open architecture electronic trading solution, to support international equity trading in major European markets as well as Canada, Brazil and Mexico, the company announced.

In addition, UNX has enhanced the platform through client integrations to include advanced real-time benchmarking and improvements to trade management and OMS functionality.

“Extending Catalyst to support international markets represents an important milestone as we rapidly grow the core EMS capabilities across regions and asset classes in response to client demand,” stated Ruth Colagiuri, head of global product management for UNX in the release

According to Colagiuri, who answered follow up questions via email, UNX has built international support into the Catalyst trading EMS and also into the Software Development Kit (SDK). Though UNX did not build an independent connectivity network in these regions, UNX is able to offer broker-neutral execution in Europe, Canada and Latin America via its broker partners such as Goldman Sachs, UBS and Credit Suisse. UNX also released Version 4.0 of its SDK, which now includes interfaces to support multi-currency, global market data and order handling.

Clients, broker dealers, exchanges and third-party application vendors can use the UNX SDK to develop applications or add-ins for use in Catalyst by tapping into multiple open APIs that provide access to thousands of callable functions and support a broad range of programming languages, said the release. Users can add new functionality, update their offerings and integrate applications, without involving the UNX development staff and incurring additional development costs, said the company.

Recent applications that were made available are Goldman Sach’s pre-trade analytics and QSG’s transaction cost analysis product. “We’re seeing an increased demand for pre-trade analytics, and UNX’s SDK allowed us to develop and deploy our analytics to select Goldman Sachs clients using Catalyst in record time,” commented Rishi Nangalia, managing director and head of business development, Goldman Sachs Electronic Trading, in the release. “We plan to use the SDK to build and integrate future value-added products and services into Catalyst.”

Both Catalyst and the UNX SDK were built on open, modular architecture using Microsoft .NET technology. Commenting in the release, Colagiuri said, “The SDK empowers market participants to deliver proprietary content and value-added products directly to their clients, leveraging the broker-neutral Catalyst Portal as a distribution channel.”

For example, as a result of major client integrations completed recently, Catalyst now offers an extensive suite of trading P&Ls, realized, unrealized and theoretical calculations based upon market data, derived statistical benchmarks and/or user-specified benchmarks, wrote Colagiuri in the email. The Catalyst SDK also allows customers and brokers to integrate additional proprietary statistics and benchmarks to further evaluate their execution quality in real time, said Colagiuri in the email.

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