&nbsp

Frank DiMarco is a managing director in electronic fixed income trading at ITG.

1. Assess the state of your corporate bond trading platform – what were the primary milestones/accomplishments over the past year?
We have spent considerable time integrating our trading platform with OMS systems. OMS integration syncs trades done on our platform to the OMS-based trading blotter and compliance system, enabling clients to adopt our technology with minimal change to their current workflows. We integrate via FIX-in blotter sweeping and staging protocols, which are well-known in equities and emerging in fixed income markets. We have become certified with leading OMS vendors including CRD, Eze, Moxy, Linedata, and Fidessa, and have more OMS vendors in the pipeline.

2. What end-user/buy-side challenges are you addressing, and how?
Our goal is to provide a more efficient solution to credit trading that uses cutting-edge technology to empower the end user. By leveraging our expertise from our high-tech equities business, we offer an all-to-all, anonymous crossing network for credit securities. We feature price negotiation without size display in order to enable price discovery while limiting information leakage. The price negotiation is enhanced by our proprietary pricing engine, which aggregates market inputs to produce a real-time inside market for each security. Derived from the market, our pricing offering reflects real-time market conditions, in contrast to latency prone theoretical pricing which may be based solely on TRACE data inputs.

3. What are your key current initiatives?
Currently, we are continuing to expand our client base on both the buy side and sell side, as well as expanding our global client base. Internally, we are also continuing to integrate our platform with more OMSs and improve the design of the technology for a more seamless workflow. We are also preparing to expand our offering by adding complementary products to our crossing network such as post-trade cost analysis, as well as a wider range of securities to trade, such as non-TRACE international credit.

4. How would you assess the future of the corporate bond trading platform business (broadly), and your business specifically?
We see the corporate bond trading platform business increasing in popularity among the buy-side as it becomes more mainstream and becomes increasingly integrated into current workflows. However, in the upcoming years we also see a consolidation or thinning of the credit trading providers as end user adoption shows which platform type is most successful. Specifically, we are working to increase our footprint and reputation in the industry, as well as provide the most cutting-edge technology in the industry.