Best FX analytics provider: smartTrade Technologies

The smartTrade LiquidityFX system has allowed smartTrade Technologies’ customers across Asia’s FX markets to optimise liquidity provision based on their specific FX needs

smartTrade Technologies’ end-to-end solution, which can be tailored to every customer’s needs at an affordable cost, is the key to it winning Best FX analytics provider in the FX Markets Asia FX Awards 2023. In the past year, smartTrade Technologies’ expansion in Asia has seen five major new customers join its user community and many more expand their usage of the company’s end-to-end solution. In addition to it being flexible enough to accommodate even the most demanding of customers’ requirements, it also benefits from a flat-fee pricing model. In a market as highly regulated as Asia’s, in which customers must also pay close attention to the FX brokerage fees applied by many vendors, this flexible and affordable model has led to smartTrade Technologies’ ongoing success in the region. 

The majority of smartTrade Technologies’ customers in Asia want to eliminate middlemen where possible in their FX businesses, and to free themselves from conflicts of interest in venues owned by market participants. The company’s flat and predictable pricing model means costs per transaction decrease for its customers. They additionally benefit from the improved productivity, lower risk and tighter spreads achieved using smartTrade LiquidityFX (LFX). The LFX system provides sophisticated cross-asset aggregation for bank and broker customers operating in Asia’s FX markets. More specifically, the aggregator supports a combination of currencies, order types and price tiering, with more than 130 connectors to banks, exchanges, electronic communications networks, non-banks and multibank platforms. This allows smartTrade Technologies’ customers to optimise their liquidity provision based on their own particular FX needs. 

Additionally important for the company’s customers is that its venue co-location in London, New York and Tokyo enables low-latency access to the market. In tandem with this is the breadth and depth across asset classes of products offered to smartTrade Technologies’ Asia customers. The product suite includes FX spot, forwards, swaps, precious metals, non-deliverable forwards, cryptocurrencies and money market instruments, together with fixed income (specifically, rates and credit). The LFX system not only delivers customer-tailored aggregation functionality, but also risk management and distribution to smartTrade Technologies’ customers’ client franchise. All order types, including newer execution algos, are available to traders and sales traders, whether they decide to trade locally or on external venues. It comes with a state-of-the-art HTML5 graphical user interface, which allows customers to market liquidity, access internal or external algos and to upload orders or monitor application programming interface order flow. 

The open architecture of the smartTrade LFX system is also designed to make integration to third-party complementary tools easy, whether analytics, chat, charting or an order management system (OMS). smartTrade Technologies’ OMS enables sell-side firms to capture and monitor customer orders seamlessly in real time. Additionally, it allows them to manage order acceptance workflows across sales and trading teams, supervise order books’ exposure and execute client orders automatically or manually. The system is also designed to provide customers with a user-friendly trading interface that enables quick filtering of key orders and easy order-state and markup adjustments.

smartTrade Technologies continues striving to improve its product offerings for existing and future clients. The past year has seen the company invest heavily in artificial intelligence and machine learning tools to augment the power of the entire front-office trading process. At the same time, the company enhanced the aggregator to be able to price and execute single-spot products directly with liquidity providers. Machine learning models have been of particular use in the segmentation of client flows and in the identification of upselling opportunities. smartTrade Technologies has also enhanced the notifications framework to allow any bank user to subscribe to custom feeds of information on any aspect of the analytics, ensuring all bank stakeholders are well informed. In this context, the company has also invested heavily in technology to provide direct connectivity to banks for electronic options pricing. 

Looking ahead, plans are in place to improve on the foundations of clean and thorough data collection that smartTrade Technologies considers vital to the future of any successful front office. The company is also looking to enhance the ability of customers to automatically use such data to enhance and refine trading and general platform behaviour automatically. smartTrade Technologies is also looking at improving the ability of customers to use signals from data combined with custom code to make its product offerings even more competitive in the Asia FX marketplace. 

As highlighted by John Stead, pre-sales and marketing director at smartTrade Technologies: “The energy and depth of knowledge of our team, especially in Asia, has been key as we scale the company and its trading and analytics products to the next level. We look forward to the opportunity to offer even greater value to our clients and to their customers in 2023 and beyond.” 
 

smartTrade Technologies was named Best FX analytics provider in the FX Markets Asia FX Awards 2023.

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