How has this year been for you so far?

We’ve had so many events in the market: from Covid to the Ukraine war to the mini-budget, central banks being hawkish, rate hikes – so there’s been a lot of volatility. This has resulted in increased volatility, so trading costs have gone up. In the past, small lines you could trade very easily, but you’re now having to work a lot harder – sometimes we’re only getting one or two prices back. So smaller size trades are taking a lot longer – trades where we’d usually just use automation and move on to high touch trades, we now have to spend more time on, which means we have less time to focus on high touch, because we’re having to spend more time on what should be low touch. We’re now thinking smarter about how we can adjust our parameters for automation for this environment to make sure we are still optimally using technology and benefiting from the efficiencies we’ve established. This may mean fewer quotes, a longer time limit, and so on.  

How is your team coping with the change? 

Our team are traders and portfolio managers, and it’s all hands on deck. We’re all learning things, all the time – this period has been intense, but a great learning opportunity. For years, nothing changed – now, every time we look at the news there’s something else we need to take into consideration. It’s an eye-opening time. Things are better now though – the worst time was through Covid,  when screen levels were not reflective of where risk was clearing. 

“The key is to use automation to our advantage to help us navigate volatile markets.”  

There’s a bright side though. We’ve been exploring different platforms, finding new sources of liquidity, and especially, learning how to use automation to our advantage. There are lots of exciting new elements now, such as using algos that work your trade slowly in the background. You just set parameters, and it works that trade for you, breaking it up throughout the day instead of executing in one big block. It can help you get better execution and better liquidity. 

The key is to use automation to our advantage to help us navigate volatile markets.  

What developments are making your job easier? 

Bonds are not like equities, there are so many and there won’t always be liquidity in every bond. There’s been a big rise in portfolio trading over recent months, especially sterling portfolio trading, which has seen volumes shoot up. It’s an additional tool in our toolkit,  and can save a lot of time, because instead of five traders trading 100 lines each, you can hand all that to one portfolio trade. We still do a lot of pre-trade work, obviously, but it can make things more efficient. In addition, it can result in reduced overall cost of execution when we trade as a package.   

How has the gilt crisis impacted your job? 

Thankfully we don’t hold any leveraged positions, but given the extreme market moves and volatility in the UK market we were diligent in maintaining liquidity and maintaining our risk tight to the benchmark.  

What has been your biggest challenge this year? 

There has been a huge increase in issuance, but at the same time, bank balance sheets have not been growing at the same pace, so we need to look at additional liquidity sources – and I think that buy-side participants can do more to fill that space.  

“Buy-side to buy-side simply hasn’t taken off yet in fixed income, and that needs to change.”

Buy-side to buy-side simply hasn’t taken off yet in fixed income, and that needs to change. There are no established protocols or platforms for this to to happen in scale. The industry still needs to evolve to be able to facilitate this, but it will be an important development for the fixed income markets if we are able to do so. 

All-to-all trading is taking off on platforms where a trade will go to all signed-up participants – and it is a great source of additional liquidity. But you’re not going to send a big trade there, because there’s a lot of price and information leakage. 

A consolidated tape would also be a step forward and is coming. This will entail having more access to prices that are traded, in a timely manner. The question is how long will this take and in what form?   

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Mark Smith

FX specialist and serial entrepreneur, Mark Smith, was cautious on Bitcoin as a new concept back in 2009. Given his years in foreign exchange, he tells me his initial thought was that it was “some kind of computer science project” and was astonished anyone would refer to it as a legitimate currency.

But it was a firm insistence and vouching from famed cryptocurrency investor Michael Novogratz which would go on to change the direction of Smith’s career for the years to come.  “I heard you’re looking for some new technology – well, it’s Bitcoin,” Novogratz informed him, years before the concept became mainstream. So Smith took another look Bitcoin and blockchain, talking to clients, researching, understanding the Byzantine General’s problem proof, double spending and then – he says – the lightbulb went on.

More than a decade later, Smith and his eight-year-old FinTech Symbiont have patiently waded through the complexities of capital markets innovation to partner with asset management giant Vanguard, alongside the likes of State Street, Citi, BNY Mellon and Nasdaq.

Through its partnership with Vanguard, two major developments have occurred. The first a pilot designed to digitise the issuance of asset-backed securities (ABS), and the second a widely commended project completing the margin calculation process for a live trade of a 30-day foreign exchange forward contract through the use of distributed ledger technology (DLT).

“Through Vanguard’s partnership with Symbiont, we’ve leveraged cutting-edge distributed ledger technology to build the world’s first ever digital collateral-linked currency forward trade margining process,” says Warren Pennington, head of investment management Fintech strategies group principal at The Vanguard Group.

“We’ve also modernised the management of our index funds that track CRSP indexes by running our data processes via Symbiont’s DLT software.”

Rather than the traditional innovation pattern of asset managers being steered by their service providers, Smith and Symbiont have looked to flip the script and put the power with the asset manager. The concept enables them to lead the innovation and bring their services providers along for the ride. This is a difficult proposition, particularly when approaching custodians who – aside from the past four years or so – have been a difficult sell on partnerships with DLT start-ups, with the difficulty beginning with getting through the door and never really letting up from there.

“We talk about Vanguard being willing to be the tip of the spear,” Smith adds. “Take the risk, make the investment to benefit the whole market, because what they’re doing is going to be applied to everybody else that wants to use. 

“Being willing to do things for the betterment of the market itself is a unique thing, and when it’s someone as big as Vanguard, well, you know you kind of keep yourself embedded as hard as you can and perform as best you can, and eventually it’ll all tip and it’ll going to be fantastic.”

The first live trade for foreign exchange forward contracts leveraged blockchain technology and smart contracts in December 2021 in what State Street called a “monumental industry initiative” to digitise the margining process around collateralised foreign exchange forward contracts that will reduce its customers operational challenges.

Vanguard told The TRADE it sees a wide range of practical applications of DLT and smart contracts, with the technologies improving market structure by reducing risk, increasing automation, and mitigating counterparty disputes, all of which contribute to lower costs, increased speed, and improved outcomes for investors.

“The platform we’ve partnered with Symbiont to build has the potential to drive numerous improvements in the capital markets,” added Pennington.

The FX innovation involving Symbiont, Vanguard and State Street is intriguing. Their goal was to bring post-trade workflow automation and efficiencies while significantly reducing the amount of counterparty credit risk in the over-the-counter currency market. Harnessing the benefits of blockchain technology within the largely manual currency forwards market will eventually enable the underlying contracts to also be instantiated, signed, executed and documented on a single unalterable record, digitally securing the trades and allowing for automation over their duration.

By deploying these contracts on DLT, more frequent and automated valuations can be facilitated. In addition, the move allows parties in the network to move and settle collateral instantly, which in turn reduces counterparty risk and streamlines processes for those forwards that are not cleared and subject to margining.

“When you look at the results of that application – it doesn’t matter if it’s decentralised, it doesn’t matter if it’s on the blockchain, it doesn’t matter if it’s a smart contract. It solves a huge problem, exactly how we wanted it to, with determinism every time it runs, it spits out the same kind of performance which is counterparty compression risk of around 80% across a 30-day forward. Which is, huge, just massive.”

Through Assembly – Symbiont’s blockchain platform for building and running decentralised applications – Smith and his team have looked to build an enterprise product that is compliant, can scale and has the proper privacy and confidentiality features. He believed, from the outset, that this was the way the start-up could empower incumbent financial services providers to take advantage of – what in 2013 was seen as a ‘powerful new, early game technology’ – and enable them to transform their business into the digital future.

“You need privacy and confidentiality in order for it to be used by institutions, which of course goes against public blockchains, because they’re not supposed to be private at all. The point is they’re supposed to be public and open,” Smith explains. “But for institutional capital markets and finance, you have to privacy and confidentiality, that’s just table stakes of what you’re doing. 

“And you have to also be able to store data in a database, which is a novel concept of the distributed ledger space because most people don’t store them with data, they store hashes and they keep the data in a third-party database somewhere.

“The thought is: building networks is hard and it creates a need for a coalition of the willing to join and run these nodes to create these decentralised networks and if you don’t use cryptocurrency to incentivise someone for running the load. Then why are they running it? And the answer was out there: so you can service your clients. Vanguard is being serviced by data providers and counterparty banks for trades, exchanges, clearing houses and custodians. Then that makes it a network, if you just get each of them to join to support Vanguard.”

Smith has been patient on his journey. Having built and sold businesses in just a few years in the past, he knew blockchain in the financial markets would be a longer excursion. In fact, he’s spent double that time courting State Street, in what has been a six-year process since first knocking on the door of the custodian. But while custodians and other service providers remain on his radar for the future, Smith says asset managers have – and always will – be Symbiont’s focus, because with this technology “the tail wags the dog”.

“Asset managers historically have been boxed out of technological innovation, and they’ve just been subject to whatever the vendor creates or whatever their sell side provider will give them in the form of tools,” he concludes.

“Historically, they have been at the mercy of reconciliation so that they have to continually go back and forth and create this reconciliation with their providers. 

The idea now – for the first time – that they can be on a level playing field with the service providers, the sell-side, the custodians, and have that same experience as everybody else and build products that they want really is an interesting value proposition that they haven’t considered.

We’ve got Vanguard enabled in the cloud and we showed them how to integrate, be nimble and they’ve been amazing partners, so I think that’s going to continue to happen as every asset manager realises they can have a seat at the table, share data and create.”

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BondCliQ is Wall Street’s first consolidated corporate bond quote system. The firm claims to aggregate 70,000 pre-trade bid and offer quotes on 15,000 bonds daily from 40 dealers.

Also lending its support was buy-side giant Vanguard, which has formed a strategic partnership with the BondCliq; and Aflac Ventures and SEI, which both took part in the latest $7.5 million funding round led by LSEG.

The company confirmed that the money raised would be invested for corporate purposes: including a move into new corporate bond markets, especially in Europe.

“As BondCliQ continues to develop and operate this important structure for the corporate bond industry, we look forward to working with LSEG in the US, Europe and beyond,” said Chris White, BondCliQ’s chief executive.

“We thank these participating buy-side and financial technology institutions for their commitment to BondCliQ and know these important relationships will play a critical role in creating a healthier corporate bond market that better serves the end investor. We also continue to speak with other potential investors interested in participating in the transformation of the corporate bond market.”

The development comes at a pivotal moment for Europe in its journey towards implementing a consolidated market data source.

In amendments to MiFID II announced in November, the European Commission and the European Markets Securities Authority (ESMA) proposed to implement a single pre-trade consolidated tape provider for each asset class. The plans have proved contentious because of their revenue model, which would see the profits of the tape largely fed back into incumbent exchanges and venues.

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Together, the firms have been actively looking into the application of blockchain technology to undertake margin processing for foreign exchange forwards and swaps.

Their goal was to bring post-trade workflow automation and efficiencies while significantly reducing the amount of counterparty credit risk in the over-the-counter currency market.

The firms claim that harnessing the benefits of blockchain technology within the largely manual currency forwards market will eventually enable the underlying contracts to also be instantiated, signed, executed and documented on a single unalterable record, digitally securing the trades and allowing for automation over their duration.

By deploying these contracts on DLT, more frequent and automated valuations can be facilitated.

In addition, the move allows parties in the network to move and settle collateral instantly, which in turn reduces counterparty risk and streamlines processes for those forwards that are not cleared and subject to margining.

“State Street Digital is incredibly pleased to have collaborated with both Vanguard and Symbiont on this monumental industry initiative to digitise the margining process around collateralised foreign exchange forward contracts that will reduce our customers operational challenges through process automation and state of the art technologies,” said Nadine Chakar, head of State Street Digital.

“Our newly launched division, State Street Digital, was created to help drive innovation and address the industry’s digital transformation. We appreciate the joint collaboration on this project and look forward to future partnerships and further developing our digital capabilities for the crypto and digital assets environment.”

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Vanguard has appointed the former director of sustainable investment products at FTSE Russell as its first head of environmental and social corporate governance (ESG) strategy for the UK and Europe.

In the newly created role, Fong Yee Chan will be responsible for evolving the asset manager’s approach to ESG in Europe to ensure that it meets the needs and demands of its clients.

Chan joins Vanguard as head of ESG strategy for the UK and Europe after nearly four years at FTSE Russell as a director for sustainable investment products in EMEA.

Prior to joining FTSE Russell, Chan also served as an ESG product director for two and a half years at eFront, which BlackRock acquired for $1.3 billion in March 2019, and as a senior manager focused on ESG strategy at Principles for Responsible Investment for over three years. 

“Vanguard’s approach to ESG is expansive, nuanced and focused on maximising long-term value for investors,” said Sean Hagerty, head of Vanguard Europe.

“As many investors look to us to both safeguard and grow their investments, Vanguard approaches ESG through our thoughtful offering of investment products, integrating ESG considerations throughout our investment processes, and our investment stewardship activities across our fund range.”

Chan’s appointment is the second senior new hire focused on ESG made by a major market participant this year as the market continues to see increased demand for sustainable investment alternatives.

In January, UK investment bank Barclays appointed a new global head of ESG research, Marie Freier, after confirming its plans to expand its ESG research capabilities last year.

“I am delighted that Fong Yee has joined Vanguard. Her deep ESG expertise will help accelerate our efforts to inform investors about our perspective on ESG topics, and we will continue to seek ways to deliver value to investors,” Hagerty concluded.

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The project recently completed a pilot whereby Vanguard simulated multiple 30-day FX forward contracts with the other industry players, in a proof of concept that tests how firms could trade OTC markets on a DLT network in the future.

“For more than two years, we’ve been developing blockchain use cases to help transform the capital markets,” said Warren Pennington, principal and head of Vanguard’s investment management FinTech strategies group. “The current environment emphasises the need to streamline, automate, and secure critical business processes. When procedures are highly reliant on manual intervention and disconnected operations, it makes the markets vulnerable to disruption from crises and even simple manual mistakes.”

Using blockchain technology, the firms added that the forwards market will be able to execute and document trades on a single, unchangeable record to digitally secure the transactions. Market participants can also value, move, and settle collateral instantly to reduce risk and streamline processes for the instruments, which are non-cleared and subject to margining.

“Our work towards conducting the first FX forward contract on a DLT is one of a number of use cases we are looking at in our efforts to modernise trade lifecycles and improve the client experience,” Jason Vitale, head of FX at BNY Mellon, commented. “We think this partnership with Vanguard is an important step for the FX market, further automating end to end workflows”

Vanguard has been working with Symbiont since 2017 to apply blockchain technology to data management processes. The investment firm looked to simplify the index data sharing process by moving the information onto a single decentralised databased.

“This platform is another example of how we’re transforming capital markets infrastructure through blockchain technology,” Mark Smith, CEO of Symbiont, added. “Vanguard is an example of a forward-thinking financial services institution that is helping accelerate necessary change in the FX markets. This is not just about innovation – but about bringing much-needed efficiency and automation to this asset class.”

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Maria Garcia, interest rates trader, BlackRock

Maria joined BlackRock in February 2019, and primarily focuses on trading emerging market rates. Prior to joining BlackRock, Maria worked as a junior portfolio manager at Hywin Capital in Mayfair, London, where she focused on overseeing an oil equities and equity options portfolio. Before Hywin, Maria worked as an emerging markets rates and foreign exchange trader with Natixis Investment Bank, also in London. Maria holds a BSc Economics degree with a focus on Econometrics from Royal Holloway, University of London, from which she graduated in 2014. Maria has been commended for her knowledge of the emerging markets trading environment.

Christopher Bukogiannis, fixed income trader, DWS Group

Christopher graduated with a 1st in International Finance from Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences in January 2019, after interning for two rotations at the FI&C trading desk of DWS in 2017 and 2018. He started a full-time role with the firm in October 2018 as a fixed income trader and quantitative analyst, with a trading focus on investment grade and high yield credits, as well as emerging markets covering the global fixed income portfolio management community. Christopher also spends a fair amount of time with quantitative data analyses and coding and, in addition, implemented portfolio trading for DWS with cutting edge technology as the main portfolio trader for DWS. He was described as “already an influential player in a very challenging trading environment” and a “pioneer and visionary in leading industry changes in trading pattern” by his peers.

Sonal Karsan, portfolio manager/trader, Vanguard Asset Management

Sonal started her career in finance with U.S. Bank where she was an alternative investments analyst, with primary responsibility for multi-asset fund administration for global macro hedge funds, before moving to State Street Global Advisors in 2014 as a portfolio analyst. Sonal spent two years with State Street as a portfolio analyst, providing operational fund support for passive and active equity portfolio managers and performance attribution analysis. In 2016, Sonal moved to Vanguard as an ETF investment analyst before taking on a trading role last year. She was promoted to the portfolio manager/trader position at the start of November, trading equities as well as managing equity portfolios for the firm. Sonal has been commended for her analyst expertise as a foundation for a successful move to a trading role.

Jimmy Cole, equity trader, Moore Capital Management

Jimmy began his career in finance on the sell-side with KCG in 2016 as a junior equity sales trader, after graduating from the University of Hertfordshire with a master’s degree in Finance and Investment Management. He moved to Virtu Financial in mid-2017, continuing to trade equities, before joining the buy-side with Moore Capital Management in April this year, broadening his knowledge of various asset classes, with a primary focus on achieving best execution. Jimmy has been commended for his “exceptional ability, drive and resilience” backed by “sound judgement and skill which has made him stand out as a high performing trading counterpart”.

Sam Vaughan-Jones, equity dealer, Royal London Asset Management

Sam joined Royal London Asset Management in November 2015 as an equity dealer and has been part of the firm’s centralised dealing desk since early last year. He had previously fulfilled a similar role with Close Asset Management from 2009. He graduated from Newcastle University in 2006 with a BSc in Business, Management, Marketing and Related Support Services. Sam’s peers have praised his excellence of execution and discipline, and he is described as “an integral part of their growth and expansion as a firm”.

This year’s Rising Stars of Trading and Execution will be awarded during the cocktail reception at this year’s Leaders in Trading awards ceremony.

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Nine major financial institutions have called on regulators to take action to make central counterparties (CCPs) safer amid concerns that clearing houses may fail when faced with severe market shocks.

BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Allianz, Citi, Societe Generale, State Street, T. Rowe Price and Vanguard published a joint paper detailing how regulators could improve the “safety and soundness” of CCPs. 

In a statement, the industry heavyweights said that CCPs have been increasingly relied upon to protect from counterparty losses during market shock events. Despite regulators taking steps to improve the situation in recent years, the banks and asset managers agreed that issues relating to resilience, recovery and resolution of CCPs need action.

“Our recommendations would help ensure that clearing members’ and end-users’ exposures to the CCP are limited, ascertainable and manageable,” said Marnie Rosenberg, global head of clearing house risk and strategy at JP Morgan.

The recommendations the organisations have put to authorities focus on the key concerns around resilience, recovery and resolution.

They include ensuring CCPs are subject to greater risk management standards, requiring CCPs to make “material contributions” of their own capital to the default waterfall, introducing a clearing ballot to support CCP recovery, and regular reviews of CCP rulebooks by resolution authorities with CCP primary regulators, and systemic risk regulators.

“Together, our recommendations will help ensure that CCPs are optimally structured to make sure the market remains resilient in the unlikely event of a meaningful disruption,” Eileen Kiely, Deputy head of counterparty and concentration risk at BlackRock, commented.

Similarly, Vanguard’s global head of capital markets legal and regulatory at Vanguard, William Thum, added that although many risks related to central clearing have been mitigated, additional protections are needed to strengthen margin calculations and default fund components, while preserving assets of non-defaulting participants.

“Together, these recommendations form a path forward to aligning incentives and enhancing financial stability through even stronger CCPs,” said Nicolas Friedman, global co-head of counterparty risk at Goldman Sachs.

The debate over CCP safety and soundness was given impetus last year after a high-profile default at the Nordic clearing house run by Nasdaq caused two-thirds of its mutual default fund, which its clearing members contribute to, was used to cover the loss.

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BlackRock is increasingly looking beyond traditional front-office roles by training its staff across the front-, middle- and back-office in order to give its team a full end-to-end picture of the investment process.

Speaking at this year’s InvestOps conference, Lou Rosato, global investment operations strategy and industry engagement at BlackRock, said that he expects there to be “fewer ditch diggers and more cathedral builders” in the future.

“The simple thing to do – which we do – is rotate people into different roles. We’re very proud that we have high performers that go across these different activities and functions,” Rosato commented.

“The traditional path would be going into trading or client facing activities and actually recently we have gone the other way and have brought people from trading and client facing into trading into operations. We are moulding together all of the skillsets. They can see the across the full picture with an end-to-end view. If we’re not end-to-end in the way we think we are, we’re stuck.”

Rosato’s comments echo a trend across asset managers where the role of operations is shifting amidst cultural change and the growing importance of automation, data and artificial intelligence for middle-office workflows.

“In this environment the impact of operations is getting more important,” said James Kearney, head of global investment operations at Vanguard during the same panel. “I really hope that starting in 2020 this is the decade where operations becomes sexy.

“Investment managers have found all the alpha they could find, this is the battleground where you are going to be able to make things better.”

Other speakers at the event had also addressed these issues while speaking as part of separate sessions. Jordan O’Neill, head of operations and treasury at Aspect Capital, said that the classic operations specialist was a “dying breed” at the hedge fund.

“If I look at my team they are more business analysts and process engineers, they need to be able to sit and talk with the technologists,” he said. “What we’ve seen work best is whereby the business user and developer are away in a room.

“We tend to not hire too many operational specialists these days, we look more for generalists with broader skill sets who can lend their hand well to taking a process and condensing it down.”

With technology and data becoming such essential components in the investment operations processes at asset management firms, being able to understand the business alongside the technology is becoming crucial.

Discussing the relationship between the front- and, middle- back-office, Arnaud Zeitoun global head of transformation at BNP Paribas Asset Management, also said the firm was looking to enhance the relationship between the two teams.

“What we’re trying to do is change the relationship between the back/middle and front,” he said. “There used to be that whatever the front wanted they get, but the more you dig into that you see the issues it causes throughout the organisation.

“The more you can reverse the relationship and have ops teams lead the framework in which the front-office can function smoothly is very efficient.”

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Andy Maack, global head of FX trading, Vanguard

What impact have global politics, such as Brexit or Donald Trump, and other macro-economic indicators had on FX trading in recent months?

Andy Maack: Much of the impact has been centred around best execution and trying to find ample liquidity in the FX market. There has been a lot of uncertainty which definitely changes the amount of volatility in the mar­ket and also increases the overall volatility of trading. Ultimately, this can then increase some of the trading costs around implement­ing different strategies.

In our case, we are typically trying to im­plement and execute large positions and in­creased volatility can certainly make trading a little bit more expensive. But we are fortunate to have traders in three key locations around the world that can manage liquidity concerns and conditions within those regions, which gives us the ability to pass our orders around the globe and really take advantage of that. There’s a heightened awareness around the levels of risk that we’re managing and we are taking great care to minimise any potential slippage that may arise when we are execut­ing an order.

In a period that might not be as liquid, there is the risk that there might be an announcement after the close which may cause the markets to move significantly. We’re actually seeing that scenario a lot at the moment, especially given the current levels of trade tensions and the potential for a risk-off environment. For example, the Japanese yen is extremely volatile outside of the main periods of liquidity and we’ve seen some significant movements. Uncertainty is the main theme here, which in turn requires us to have a heightened sense of awareness around the potential pitfalls in our trading strategies and to proactively try to mitigate those pitfalls.

What are the broader trends currently shaping how FX is traded?

AM: There is still a tremendous amount of in­terest in the potential for disintermediation, whereby trading would be decoupled from banks and price discovery could potentially happen in outside platforms where there might be better facilities to enable peer-to-peer matching. That is pretty intriguing, especially for the foreign exchange markets which only really started to seriously explore this topic in recent months.

How are buy-side firms adapting to these changing market conditions?

AM: The buy-side and real money space is continuing to evolve and is now really start­ing to embrace the electronification of the FX markets. We are increasingly seeing the buy-side utilising more of the trading tools that are available, such as voice or request for quote (RFQ) or by using FX algorithms to execute. Previously shops were using a max­imum of maybe one or two such execution methods, but now we’re really seeing them starting to increase the breadth of tools that they have available.

Which current trends are likely to be seen over the coming year which will have the biggest impact on the FX landscape?

AM: From my perspective it’s going to be automation, looking at how we can automate more of our trades where a human cannot add any value to the process. This then frees up our traders to focus on the larger orders that we handle and enables them to focus more on where they can add value by making those important trading decisions around that flow.

Using FX algos also aligns to our best inter­ests and those of our shareholders, particular­ly where we don’t necessarily have any alpha in the currencies that we’re trading but we are just trying to minimise the market impact. Algos allow us to reduce the execution costs of those very large orders by chopping it up into much smaller pieces. By being extremely passive with those orders we’re able to sig­nificantly outperform what the risk transfer price would have been at the time of trading, so we’re able to warehouse these trades over a longer period of time. These orders tend to be very large, but they’re small as an overall percentage of the portfolio that we’re trading which makes them a perfect fit for algo exe­cution. And then the other major theme again is going to be peer-to-peer matching in the forward market space.

What are the most pressing topics you are looking forward to hearing discussed in more detail at TradeTech FX this year?

AM: The topic I’m most looking forward to hearing about is the diversity and inclusion panel, which I’m excited to be taking part in. What we’re able to do in this industry to encourage under-represented groups is ex­tremely important as this allows us to continue building great working environments and ef­fective trading teams. Ultimately, diversity and inclusion are essential to extracting the most from teams and it will be really great to hear what other shops are doing to address this.

I’m also very interested to hear more about distributed ledger and blockchain and how our industry might be able to employ these technologies to potentially make settlement easier or to make collateral movement easier, as well as how FinTech in general is going to potentially going to change FX market structure.

The opportunity to talk to other European real money managers that are using FX for­wards to hedge flows back to local currencies will also be invaluable as the industry now needs to figure out a way that we can use peer-to-peer matching to find and execute better prices in our forward swaps.

What are you most hoping to take away from this year’s event? AM: It’s always a great learning experience to see and hear what all of the different clients around the world are doing and thinking about and focusing on. It is also a great opportunity to catch up with all the sell-side and vendors all in one place and to know that you are really hearing and seeing the fore­front of what’s happening in the FX market from its best and the brightest.

This article was originally published in the TradeTECH FX Daily magazine, produced by The TRADE, which was distributed to attendees of this year’s TradeTech FX Europe conference.

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