Buyer’s Guide: Sellside Fixed Income E-trading Solutions 2021

The findings of this third edition of the sellside fixed income e-trading solutions report series show that – despite a rapidly accrued amount of economic attrition within Tier I to Tier IV CIB fixed income business and trading models globally as a number of post-financial crisis factors settled into normality – the leading technology vendors in the marketplace have all-but-completed a vast functional capabilities mapping exercise encompassing thousands of securities and hundreds of trading processes and workflows, many of which are now solely algorithmically driven or fully automated in nature.

The challenge then that remains for technology vendor-provided fixed income e-trading OEMS that are fit-for-purpose within increasingly complex and segmented CIB bonds and swaps brokerage franchises is the flattening of competitive differentiation associated with the breadth of functional capability required to leverage markets connectivity infrastructure at-scale and in an all-to-all, exchange-like fashion.

The survey questionnaire underpinning this report required the participating technology vendors to provide self-assessments of the breadth and depth of their sellside fixed income e-trading solutions:

• across 21 instruments and products; and
• across five functional groupings and 198 granular functionalities.

This report reviews the functional capabilities of:

• AxeTrading AxeTrader;
• ION Markets ION Fixed Income;
• LIST SpA FastTrade;
• SoftSolutions nexRates & BestX: FI-A;
• valantic Trading FSA iQSuite.