http://www.fow.com/Article/3154709/Themes/26528/To-write-or-not-to-write.html
To write, or not to write?
12 February 2013
Nasdaq’s new trading platform NLX is gearing up for launch in London. Sentiment is shifting in favour of the prospects for the MTF. This highlights the dilemma for ISVs and their role in the success of a new trading platform, argues William Mitting.
Six months ago you would have struggled to find anyone in London who thought that NLX, the new London-based exchange from Nasdaq OMX, would succeed.
The prevailing wisdom was the plan to launch six interest rate contracts replicating the most liquid on Liffe and Eurex was too simplistic, the margin efficiencies intangible and the distraction of regulation and rising costs elsewhere too great to guarantee the involvement from the banks and prop trading firms that it needs for a successful launch.
Today all the talk in London is of NLX. After six months of painstaking road-showing and collaboration with local participants by Charlotte Crosswell and her team at NLX there is a real buzz about the launch around the City.
Much of that buzz is coming from the proprietary trading houses. Attracted by the lower fees, the lower participation from HFTs expected on the platform and the belief that the banks, who are expected to benefit from the margin efficiency enabled by portfolio margining across the yield curve, will provide liquidity, London’s largest prop houses are increasingly talking up the prospects of the MTF.
This rapid shift in sentiment poses a challenge for those ISVs who made the call not to write to the MTF for its launch. The highest profile among those ISVs is Trading Technologies, which is not expected to be ready for the launch of NLX.
FOW understands that TT has been in negotiations with NLX over writing to it but has not yet reached agreement on how that will be funded. TT and NLX declined to comment on any negotiations. Initially this was widely viewed as a significant blow to NLX’s chances, but as the buzz around the platform grows, some are asking if TT has made a mistake.
Jeff Mezger, head of market connectivity, told FOW that TT had “not ruled out connecting to NLX” at its launch and see the benefits of margin efficiency but was currently focused in-flight projects such as the connection to Eris Exchange and its beta stage MultiBroker platform.
“We take into account a number of factors when prioritising the projects we work on. For exchange projects we take into account exchange location, familiarity with the exchange platform, connectivity costs, client interest, exchange volume, asset classes, products traded and the changing regulatory environment.
“We also take into account what other projects we have in flight and the availability of resources to work on the project.”
This dilemma of whether to connect to a new trading platform is a relatively new phenomenon in derivatives markets but will become more of an issue as new platforms launch in the wake of industry efforts and new regulations aimed at opening up competition.
All ISVs have limited manpower and resources to write to new platforms and the decision of whether to do so is often made with little visibility as to whether that platform will succeed.
Usually one or a number of customers will help to fund the connection, sometimes the platform or exchange will pay the majority of the cost and for “dead certs” the ISV will fund it in the knowledge that it will see a return on investment. However, what constitutes a dead cert is becoming less clear as markets proliferate.
Steve Grob, director of group strategy at Fidessa, said: “The whole dynamic of ISVs connecting to venues has changed since Mifid was introduced back in 2007. Volumes that were concentrated in two or three exchanges were spread over multiple platforms.”
This altered the economics of connectivity as it meant that brokers were having to spread the same volumes over multiple venues and this inevitably led to downward pressure on gateway pricing. At the same time, the number of platforms launched with uncertain prospects is increasing.
When Liffe launched its Connect platform at the turn of the century, many ISVs wrote to it and made a decent return doing so. As the derivatives market becomes more fragmented thanks to Dodd Frank and EMIR, it is harder to predict which platforms are worth the investment.
“The challenge is picking the markets that have the best chance of success,” says Steve Woodyatt, chief executive of Object Trading, which will connect to NLX on day one.
Hamish Purdey, the chief executive of Ffastfill, which is also going live from day one, agrees: “It takes significant commercial judgement. Any ISV has competing priorities and the challenge is finding the ones with the greatest return on investment.”
For fledgling exchanges, a major ISV writing to it can provide a significant boost and it is not unheard of for exchanges to pay large sums to global ISVs to write to them. However, this is rare and in most instances ISVs must make a call on the commercial benefits of connecting to a new exchange.
The fact that the cost of switching to a new provider can be high means that if a large ISV does not write to an exchange, its customers, if unwilling to fund the connection themselves, are often left with no options and the decision not to connect can be contentious.
However, as competition grows in terms of connectivity providers and software-as-a-service operations makes the process of switching provider less arduous, a shift in sentiment in terms of the market’s perception of the need to connect to an exchange can potentially wrong foot ISVs.
RTS has announced publically that it will write to NLX from launch and FOW understands that Fidessa, Sungard, Object Trading, Stellar and Orc are also among those ISVs providing day one access.
TT and Marex’s STS are among the notable absences from day one trading (although FOW understands STS will be up and running shortly afterwards) but there is still some distance to run and TT could still commit before the launch date, which is expected for early Q2. However, the NLX example has brought to the fore a very modern dilemma for ISVs in the derivatives business.
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