DealHub, the London-based provider of STP and connectivity feed handling software for the institutional FX industry today announced the launch of DealHub RefleX, a modular eFX platform that combines the firm’s tried and tested trading connectivity with a new price and execution management engine and an HTML5 client trading portal to deliver a high performance, multi-channel eFX platform.
Option Computers Ltd, which operates under the DealHub brand, has concentrated its efforts on providing ultra low latency feeds to FX trading divisions within the bank sector, however over the course of the past year, the firm has made steady inroads into exploring methods of entry into the non-bank institutional FX industry.
As many technology firms and executing venues concentrate their efforts on connectivity and reduction of latency in order to bring a global client base to their fold as well as to increase order flow in different regions and provide global access to liquidity, DealHub’s perspective on this matter is interesting indeed. Early last year, DealHub had indicated that connectivity between venues is only part of the solution toward seamless trading environments worldwide, and that fragmentation can make the FX market a difficult place in which to trade, especially from a technological perspective.
In these circumstances, connectivity firms such as venue-neutral Canadian infrastructure company TMX Atrium have invested in point to point connectivity between Moscow, Frankfurt and London, and Russia’s iXellerate has been expanding its datacenter in Moscow in order to advance Russia’s trading environment and attract British and North American order flow, whilst providing much quicker and more reliable ruble liquidity to the West. Whilst dedicated connectivity is one method of shrinking the world and ensuring that participants worldwide gain an interest in trading at emerging venues, DealHub’s ethos is that there is more to consider.
The firm understands clearly that a bank or broker can invest in a sophisticated pricing engine, or source liquidity from multiple providers, but they’re increasingly finding that they need to distribute that liquidity via multiple venues and trading channels according to customer demand, resulting in being faced with a lack of standardization.
Peter Kriskinans, CEO of DealHub made a commercial statement that “The launch of DealHub RefleX marks a major step in the evolution of our trading solutions. Over the last five years, we’ve painstakingly built out our eFX technology, working hand in hand with customers to build best of breed components for every step of the trading workflow. Our new pricing and execution tools, combined with a cutting edge HTML5 trading GUI, complete the stack – we now offer an unrivaled breadth of capabilities pre and post trade, with the commercial, technical and workflow flexibility to support banks of all sizes”
DealHub RefleX provides banks with a flexible toolkit of eFX modules that can be configured and customised to deliver seamless enhancement to an existing bank platform, or as an end-to-end solution for the complete eCommerce workflow from liquidity sourcing, through price management, venue and portal distribution to execution, credit and risk management, and Straight Through Processing (STP). The platform also features built in business intelligence tools for monitoring trading performance and system latency, as well as compliance investigation and surveillance. DealHub RefleX can be deployed on-premise or delivered as a service from DealHub’s co-located hosting facilities in Equinix LD4 and NY4.
Chris Leaver, COO of DealHub further explained that “Very few banks now opt for a 100% build strategy in eFX, and the first generation vendor platforms are looking dated, with limited flexibility or differentiation. DealHub RefleX offers banks a genuine alternative – the platform provides our customers with a flexible, fast to market route to a high performance, customised eFX platform – one component at a time, or across the full stack.”
Based on DealHub’s established complex event processing technology, the platform offers next generation functionality, coupled with the flexible business logic that allows banks to customise the platform to their own unique business goals.
In terms of functionality, the introduction of the DealHub RefleX solution includes what Option Computers considers to be a powerful new price engine that blends and filters liquidity from multiple sources, feeding into an intuitive trader dashboard for active rate management highly flexible margining module that adds specific customer mark-up according to multi-level criteria, pre-defined in easy to use configuration tables, as well as sophisticated logic for the calculation and decomposition of cross rates and associated margins.
Trade requests are handled by a rules-based execution management module, which includes last look validation and a comprehensive manual intervention capability, and credit checks can either be coordinated with in-house systems, or handled by the low latency limit management module.
DealHub’s FX Distribution Hub forms an integral part of the platform, providing tried and tested liquidity sourcing and price distribution connectivity to all key FX venues and a growing number of global and regional banks
The launch of DealHub RefleX also sees the introduction of a new client trading portal that works alongside DealHub’s proven venue and API distribution technology, to give clients access to the full range of distribution channels. The new portal has been developed using the latest HTML5 technology for native browser delivery and can be fully branded and extended to give banks a private electronic distribution channel with a unique customer experience.
The portal captures Spot, Forward, Swap and NDF transactions via executable streaming or request for quote models. Powerful decision support tools include a comprehensive charting library, as well as news feeds and the option to embed a fully auditable chat capability for in-deal support and automated capture of more complex trades.
The core elements of DealHub RefleX, including the new price engine, are in live use with a wide variety of bank customers, from tier one firms to regional specialists.
The new platform integrates seamlessly with DealHub’s complete range of trading, post trade and compliance solutions that combine the widest range of market connectivity, with modular pre and post trade capabilities at every stage of the trading workflow, allowing customers to rapidly build and deploy highly customised trading infrastructure that reinforces their unique competitive advantages. DealHub’s trading solutions are used by a range of Financial Markets customers, including the majority of the world’s largest banks.
