Technology Awards 2021 – Best Trading and Execution Platform

2021 Winners

 

Best Trading and Execution Platform

MarketAxess

Riad Chowdhury
head of Asia-Pacific, MarketAxess

It is fantastic to receive this award as Best Trading and Execution Platform for the second consecutive year as we address the needs of our private banks and wealth management clients to increase their operational efficiency, extend their reach into new pools of liquidity, and improve their ability to execute at best price.

What we have delivered is a combination of Axess IQ, our unique trading solution specifically designed for private banks and wealth managers, and Open Trading, the world’s largest all-to-all trading network for corporate and government debt.

Axess IQ gives private banks and wealth managers an order workflow management and trade execution platform designed specifically to manage high order volume and improve transparency between trade execution, investment strategy and end investor. It is fully integrated with Open Trading and it includes proprietary MarketAxess data & analytics that deliver accurate pretrade prices for a broader universe of corporate bonds than any other platform.

We plan to expand our business in new countries such as Japan, Korea and Taiwan, grow the team regionally and focus on product innovation in partnership with clients — exactly as we have been doing for the last 22 years.

The ability to quickly and efficiently execute at best price in Asia’s fixed-income markets was more important than ever in 2021, when a meltdown across the region’s highyield issuers prompted an evaporation of liquidity.

MarketAxess, which has won Best Trading and Execution Platform at Asian Private Banker’s Technology Awards for the second year running, demonstrated it was more than up to this task.

The vendor’s order and execution workflow solution Axess IQ — which was rolled out to Asian clients in 2021 — helped private banks in the region to better manage high-order volumes during the market tumult. Among the features that proved valuable to private bank’s bond trading desks during the year were the ability to monitor queues of open orders and to automatically process and prioritise certain orders, as well as aggregating liquidity and market data into a single view.

In view of the growing global interest in the region’s debt markets, MarketAxess equally bolstered its local currency offerings. In September 2021, the vendor added trading via China’s Bond Connect and CIBM Direct to its platform, allowing private banking and wealth management clients to trade Chinese credit and rates with onshore market makers.

Figures shared with the judging panel during the review process demonstrated how the business of MarketAxess with private banking clients kept going from strength to strength during the 2021 calendar year. The volume of trades executed via the platform by regional private bank clients grew by double digits, easily outstripping the equivalent number for the global business.

That is why MarketAxess is Asian Private Banker’s 2021 winner of the Technology Award for Best Trading and Execution Platform.