Awards: Broadway Technology

Throughout 2017, the second Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (Mifid II) was the only game in town, as participants prepared for the wide-ranging European regulation to go live on January 3 this year.  The run-up to its implementation took up most of the time and resources of buy- and sell-side players in fixed income as well as FX.

“As we are embedded in 20 of the top banks in the world, we were prepared well in advance for system upgrades from our clients and we still had to make changes to our systems to meet new regulatory requirements under Mifid II,” says Tyler Moeller, chief executive and co-founder of Broadway Technology.

Broadway Technology has been voted Best Liquidity Aggregation System Provider at the 2018 FX Week e-FX Awards, and the company also garnered a highly commended mention in the Best e-FX Software Provider category.

The company spent a lot of time dealing with client requests for help in areas where they were struggled to satisfy Mifid II requirements – often using other vendors’ systems that proved unable to solve problems effectively.

“Clients used the process as an opportunity to bring new technology into play, and/or to update existing and, in some cases, outdated infrastructures,” adds Moeller.

As we are embedded in 20 of the top banks in the world, we were prepared well in advance for system upgrades from our clients and we still had to make changes to …meet …Mifid II

Tyler Moeller, Broadway Technology

But, after January, the flurry of Mifid II activity died down. The cold reality of how much budget, time and resources had been spent on the effort finally hit market participants. Having recovered from the shock, the focus is back on strategic objectives.

“Now it looks like people are moving back much more to saying, ‘OK, we need to work on the business structure as part of what we are trying to do for our overall defined strategy’,” says Moeller.

Customers are predominantly engaged in finding ways to improve the layers of liquidity in their aggregated pools, as well as improving distribution models in the complex and fragmented FX market.

Better algo strategies

Improving algo strategies for hedging purposes is also a priority, Moeller says. Combining execution and hedging activities in one system is a hot topic for clients, as well as the desire to maximise pricing capabilities through liquidity management.

“A tremendous number of the deals we are currently working on now are actually around providing systems able to price forward/swap risk and not only spot risk,” Moeller says.

“A lot of people are still looking at systems and treating them as separate pieces, like aggregation is a separate piece from e-commerce, which is separate from risk management, etc. But we are seeing a lot [of] deals where institutions are really looking at the entire stack as a whole system, which we expect to be the future,” Moeller concludes.

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