In terms of overall trends, this report examines how, since 2000, e-trading became the norm across all asset classes and types of financial institutions, which resulted in the e-trading software market evolving along three key groups:
- High-touch trading platforms;
- Low-touch trading platforms; and
- Automated, Buy & Build trading platforms.
Within the equities asset class, specifically, this report explores how the steep growth and high penetration of e-trading technology across regions and types of financial institutions in recent years means that automated trading is now reaching almost universal adoption and a ‘stabilisation’ of market growth predominantly driven by:
- already high levels of adoption of the technology throughout all developed and some emerging economies;
- shifts toward recurring pricing models, accelerated through the adoption of software-as-a-service deployment models; and by
- competition from new entrants and vendor consolidation.
In exploring those factors in greater depth, this report shows how the e-trading software market – comprised of third-party technology vendors – is directly driven by the digitalisation of trading workflows, which are continuously increasing due to regulatory constraints and global competition between financial institutions, pushing for ever more automation, combined with a secular shift away from systems built in-house and towards vendor software.