SHORTLIST

Credit Suisse
The Swiss bank has long-been a pioneer of electronic execution and it continues to raise the standard for innovation in algorithmic trading. The rapid build-out of its electronic FX franchise over recent years has been singled out for praise among industry participants.

Deutsche Bank
The German “flow monster” has been working overtime to refine its flagship Autobahn execution platform over the last year, while its innovative App market, launched last year, has revolutionised the way it distributes a range of services, including research and trading.

Morgan Stanley
MSET, the bank’s electronic franchise, continues to stand out among its European peers for its quality of execution and breadth of service, and is always one of the first names on traders’ lips when it comes to electronic trading.

Societe Generale
The French bank has invested heavily in its algorithmic and quantitative services over the past five years, as part of a broader attempt to build a client-facing cash brokerage that complements its strength in equity derivatives. Those efforts appear to be paying off, with its new dark pool, AlphaY, launched earlier this year.

UBS
The Swiss bank has overcome some key departures in its European equities team with a renewed focus on innovative algorithmic trading solutions, including the launch in April of one of the first iPad apps that will enable its clients to build their own trading algorithms.

BlackRock
The asset manager has always prided itself on the strength of its technology and its investment platforms continue to be in high demand from third parties. It is set to use that expertise to launch a new bond-trading system, called the Aladdin Trading Network, which will allow investors to bypass investment banks.

GLG Partners
The London-based hedge fund has accelerated its technological expertise since becoming part of Man Group’s machine-heavy stable in 2010, and is one of the most sought-after clients among Europe’s sellside franchises.

JP Morgan Asset Management
With over $1 trillion of assets under management, JPAM has begun to develop an IT infrastructure to support its size, under the watch of its highly regarded head of dealing, Kristian West.

Marshall Wace
The hedge fund continues to prove itself as one of the pre-eminent trading firms of its class with some of the best brains on the block. The fund builds a number of technology services itself, including trading algos, smart order routers and transaction cost analysis tools.

Pohjola Asset Management
Finland’s largest fund manager has emerged as one of the most innovative firms of its class. Over the last year it launched an algorithmic trading service in collaboration with agency broker ITG, and is also spearheading efforts to create a Northern European buyside-only trading platform. 

Fidessa
The London-based technology group remains the dominant provider of sellside systems globally, and despite difficult market conditions continues to rack up clients with its flagship platform which combines multi asset-class order management and algorithmic trading services.

Instinet Newport
Newport is the agency brokers’ global, multi-asset class execution management system, offering customised trading strategies. In April, it announced key enhancements to the system, including new exchange-traded fund functionality and access to a wider range of the broker’s smart order routers.

SunGard
The trading technology giant is gaining praise for its StreamCore solutions, which provide a range of data processing requirements, compliance services and gives a real-time view of risk and exposure.

Trading Screen
Already a well-known name for its buyside platforms, the US-based provider launched TradePlus, its order management system for the sellside, in April this year. TradePlus integrates all trading infrastructure required by broker-dealers through a software-as-a-service model.

Ullink
The French-headquartered firm is regarded as one of the select few that can break Fidessa’s stranglehold on equities order management systems. Its Odisys product makes decisions using real-time data from multiple sources and routes orders according to user-defined best-execution policies.

Bloomberg
The data giant’s asset and investment manager service has been regularly enhanced and offers an integrated suite of solutions including order management, electronic trading and execution, as well as post-trade matching.

ConvergEx
The US broker, partially owned by The Bank of New York Mellon, is gaining traction among the buyside for its Eze order management system. The Eze OMS provides functionality to support portfolio management, compliance, trading and operations in a single platform.

Fidessa
The company has become a major provider of order management systems to the buyside since it moved into the space with the acquisition of LatentZero in 2007.

Portware
The trading system specialist has established itself as a market leader over the past five years. Its enterprise suite is a fully customisable, real-time trade management system offering risk management, order management and reporting.

Trading Screen
TradingScreen’s multi-broker, multi asset-class execution management solution, called TradeEMS, is tailored for the buyside and is a long-established favourite of the traditional asset management community.

Bats Chi-X Europe
Europe’s biggest equities market completed its deal to merge with Chi-X Europe in December, and finished integrating the two markets in May. It continues to challenge the status quo, and now has exchange market data in its sights.

Deutsche Börse Group
Despite missing out on its merger with NYSE Euronext in February, the German exchange operator remains among Europe’s biggest and most diversified exchange groups.  

London Metal Exchange
The world’s premier metals market is in the midst of sealing the deal of the year, after the Hong Kong Stock Exchanges and Clearing Ltd agreed in June to pay a chunky £1.4bn for the 135-year old market.

London Stock Exchange
It has been a strong 12 months for the London market, which has pulled off two transformative deals including the acquisition of LCH.Clearnet (subject to regulatory approval) and the purchase of the 50% of FTSE it did not already own.

UBS MTF
Launched in November 2010, the Swiss-bank owned MTF has shown excellent growth during the past year, boosted by the venue’s early adoption of the multiple clearer model, or “interoperability”, which has made it more cost-effective for firms trading on the dark pool.

Knight Sumo
Emanating from Knight Capital’s highly regarded technology team, a new version of Sumo was launched in Europe in April this year which aims to help institutions camouflage their trading activity so they can safely interact with high-frequency traders.

MS Nightowl
NightOwl is Morgan Stanley’s dark liquidity-seeking algorithm first launched in 2008 and designed to provide access to the most natural liquidity possible.  It has been enhanced this year, offering clients greater customisation to minimise information leakage in the handling of client orders.

RBC Thor Europe
Canadian bank RBC Capital Markets this year launched its flagship algorithmic trading product, THOR, in Europe, which is designed to intelligently interact with predatory high frequency trading activity. The product is part-smart order router, part-algorithm, which helps buyside firms navigate through the growing preponderance of HFT activity by ensuring that orders arrive at multiple venues at exactly the same time.

Societe Generale Eclipse
Eclipse is the French bank’s flagship liquidity-seeking algorithm which seeks to capture both lit and dark liquidity whilst minimising market impact. The algorithm has been fined tuned to include a new Quality of Venue Management venue selection logic introduced by the bank last year.

UBS Swoop
UBS Swoop is the Swiss bank’s first algo strategy specifically designed for trading in illiquid stocks, including small cap and hard-to-trade shares. It was launched globally in February this year, and has been well received among buyside traders.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch Express
The bank rolled out its new direct market access and pre-trade risk checking platform, which boasts sub 10-microsecond latency, in recent months. The platform has seen the bank pick up some major European HFT clients'.

CorvilNet Latency Management System
Corvil is rapidly becoming the de facto provider of latency management software, helping firms to better understand and enhance the performance of their trading systems. The company has upgraded the platform and picked up some big name clients during the past year, including the Tokyo Stock Exchange and Nasdaq OMX.

Fixnetix iX-EMS
The provider of low-latency managed services launched a software version of its iX-eCute nanosecond Field Programmable Gate Array product as a cost-effective alternative to the chip technology in May.

Morgan Stanley Speedway
The bank has continued to invest in its flagship direct market access platform, revamping its pre-trade risk checking functionality last year through code optimisations and hardware upgrades, while still achieving latency of around two microseconds.

Options IT Pipe
Options IT has pioneered the high performance IT infrastructure managed service model, and its direct market access Velocity offering is gaining ground in Europe.

Abel/Noser
The specialist execution and analytics provider is picking up more and more clients in Europe and has recently expanded its product coverage to include FX.

Bloomberg Transaction Cost Analysis
Bloomberg’s real-time TCA product, which is built into its execution management system, is now regularly cited as one of Europe’s top TCA providers and is increasingly giving ITG a run for its money.

Fidessa
Fidessa has positioned itself as a major provider of trading cost analysis in recent years, and has invested in building out its TCA product set. The company launched a new suite of analysis products, Fidessa Intelligence, in the US and Europe earlier this year, which combine traditional TCA with real-time analytics.

ITG
ITG was an early pioneer of transaction cost analysis technology in the equities market, and has recently extended its well-established service to cover institutional foreign exchange. The service has been very well received, according to clients.

Markit Trading Analysis’ Trade EQM
Although less well established in Europe than its big brand peers, Markit’s EQM forecasting logic – which assesses the variables that influence how a specific order size will impact the price of a stock rather than relying on the stock’s historic price volatility to approximate a wide range of outcomes – has won praise from traders.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch
The broker has two well-established teams dedicated to market structure and execution consulting, run independently of the sales function to support the client franchise as a whole.

Credit Suisse AES
The broker produces a range of lengthy, in-depth research reports on market structure issues published on an ad hoc basis, which it supplements with client events. 

Deutsche Bank
The German bank operates a dedicated market structure team across the US, Europe and Asia-Pacific which operates as a separate cost centre independent of any desk or sales function. The team distributes its DBQuant weekly factsheet and a monthly market update, along with ad hoc commentary on regulation and other topical issues.

Morgan Stanley
The bank provides a monthly market structure newsletter along with regular commentary on news items, regulation and other topical issues. The broker’s market share affords it a unique insight into Europe’s market structure and regulatory issues, according to clients.

RBC Capital
The Canadian bank has been growing in Europe and focuses on offering quality – rather than quantity – market structure research, based on highly detailed analysis. The broker, which also provides ongoing client advisory services regarding market structure issues, does not operate a dark pool and is praised by buyside firms for the independence of its research content.

Derwent Capital Markets
The hedge fund was the first to use Twitter sentiment data to trade directly, seeing a return of 1.85% before fees in July last year. In a tough hedge fund environment, investors have determined to liquidate the fund and re-launch the technology as a new trading platform whereby Twitter sentiment data will be integrated into IG Group’s spread-betting platform.

eToro
The retail FX trading social trading platform deploys so-called “crowd sourcing” via Twitter and other Twitter-like news streams to help users share trading sentiment and ideas. After four years in business, eToro has more than 1.75 million individuals in its trading network, making it by far the biggest and most successful social investing network in the space, according to Aite Group.

Streambase
The provider of complex event processing software – used by a number of firms to power their trading platforms – was among the first to tap micro-blogging site Twitter in 2009. In June, Streambase refined the service through a deal with Gnip, a provider of social media data. Streambase now takes in data from StockTwits, WordPress, Tumblr and Disqus. 

Thomson Reuters Machine Readable News
Thomson Reuters extended its machine-readable news service in March to include sentiment information mined from millions of social media sites, including internet news and blogs. The process involves assessing the sentiment, relevance and novelty of a content to derive trading signals with respect to specific stocks and sectors.

Tradeo
Launched in April following a rebrand, the venture capital-backed Tradeo says it is the first social trading platform to offer trade execution and real time community-sourced data, trading analytics and news, in addition to social features such as chat, group forums and messages.

Bats Chi-X Europe
Although the Bats Europe and Chi-X Europe books have lost a sliver of market share in recent months, they continue to offer critical competition to the established exchanges. The company has won plaudits from its customers for making major headway into the tricky Spanish market, breaking the 5% market share barrier for the IBEX35.

Deutsche Börse Xetra
The German exchange operator’s cash market is the consistent leader for trading in German equities, according to independent analysis, offering some of the tightest spreads and greatest depth of book.

LSE SETS
The LSE’s long-established main market has been praised by users for facing up to competition and for exploring new and innovative pricing regimes – and the exchange has been winning back market share. Between January and June the LSE saw its share of trading in UK stocks grow from 46.6% to 51.3%.

NYSE Euronext
NYSE Euronext has focused its efforts on enhancing the quality of its market during the past year, and the exchange continues to offer some of the best depth of book, according to analysts. The operator of the national exchanges in Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels and Lisbon, saw its overall share of European equities trading increase from 13.8% in January to 16.2% in June.

Turquoise
The Turquoise platform has staged an impressive turnaround during the past two years, rising to the number two spot in Europe among the region’s multilateral trading facilities in August last year as measured by market share of pan-European trading.

Bats Chi-X Europe CXE
The former Chi-X Europe Chi-Delta dark book continues to dominate the European dark market with around 23% average share of the market’s public dark books the past year

CS Crossfinder
Credit Suisse’s crossing network is among the biggest and is regarded as one of the best broker venues for trading in high volumes.

Liquidnet
The trading network remains the premier venue for matching large blocks of stock and is regularly cited by the buyside as their preferred trading destination. The company’s trading volumes to continue to hold up amid a difficult trading environment.

MS Pool
Morgan Stanley’s broker crossing network is regularly cited by buyside firms as their preferred broker operated dark pool due to its high volume of so-called “natural” flow and low information leakage.

Sigma-X MTF
Launched just a year ago, the Goldman Sachs-operated dark pool has grabbed more than 12% share of the market’s public dark books, overtaking both the Bats Europe dark book and the Turquoise dark book in less than 12 months.

Deutsche Börse Eurex
The German bourse’s core volumes have held up better than most during a tough first half of 2012. The launch of French debt futures have also proved popular with the market.

Ice Futures Europe
The London-based exchange is the only European market that has managed to maintain volumes amid tough trading conditions, thanks to its headlock on global benchmark Brent Crude oil futures.

NYSE Liffe
The exchange has endured a tough start to 2012, with sinking volumes and the departure of its head of derivatives. But it remains in the view of many the “Rolls Royce” of the European derivatives market. Its American business is also making headway in US treasury futures.

The Order Machine
The first competitive venue for Dutch options trading in Europe to NYSE Liffe, Tom MTF’s market share of Dutch options stood at 13% versus NYSE Liffe as of mid-July. It has surged as high as 20% during 2012, an impressive showing less than a year after its November launch.

Tradeweb
The platform has bolstered its headcount by more than a third this year in equity derivatives, and remains popular and well-positioned in rates and equity options. FX derivatives went live earlier this year.

Bloomberg
Bloomberg’s Fixed Income Trading system continues to be one of the world’s largest and most widely used fixed income trading platforms, and is a recognised market leader in credit products.

MarketAxess
The Nasdaq-listed company is one of the leading electronic trading platforms for credit markets in the US, and is gaining a similar reputation in Europe. It traded a record 22.9bn contracts in the first quarter of 2012, up 25% year on year, and has recently expanded the number of regional and specialist dealers on its platform, including desks in eastern Europe and Turkey.

MTS
The multi-dealer electronic trading platform, owned by the London Stock Exchange, has been reviewing its strategy and steeling itself for a new regulatory landscape. Over the last year it has launched a new corporate credit platform, and added gilts and Hungarian government bonds to its existing bond venue.

Tradeweb
Fast-becoming to government bonds what Bloomberg is to corporate credit, last year’s winner of this category has enjoyed continued growth over the past 12 months. Its European profits grew by a fifth to £14m last year, and the platform has recently launched trading in European repo and FX options, both of which have enjoyed positive dealer and customer support.

Vega-Chi
The convertible bond trading facility, which launched in 2010, continues to gain traction and expand into new products. It rolled out a new European high-yield bond order book in February, and is set to launch a similar platform for US junk bonds in the third quarter of this year.

Barclays BARX
Among the first to launch a proprietary FX offering in 2005, Barclays has upgraded its flagship platform with a suite of new commodity-linked securities for its wealth management clients. The bank leapfrogged UBS last year to move into third place in the closely watched Euromoney FX poll of major FX dealers.

BNP Paribas Cortex FX
The firm’s new self-built trading platform has been developed with customisation in mind and is expected to help grow the bank’s global footprint through grey-labelling to thousands of regional banks across Europe and Asia.

Citi Velocity 2.0
The bank’s investment in a brand new platform, Velocity 2.0, and the addition of electronic rates trading has spurred a huge leap in market share, bringing Citi back into serious contention with Deutsche Bank for the crown of world’s largest forex dealer.

Deutsche Bank Autobahn
Still the market leader by a distance in electronic FX trading, the German bank is launching its own major upgrade aimed at shoring up its flagship franchise. Its hugely popular Auotbahn apps market, launched last year, has been replicated across the industry.

Morgan Stanley Matrix
At a reputed $100m outlay, the bank’s Matrix platform didn’t come cheap. But its in-built functionality for research, analysis and trade analytics has been widely praised as the best on the market.

360T
The German platform received a cash boost from its private equity owners this year, as the FX and rates platform bids to shore up its position as the market’s best value multi-dealer execution venue.

Bloomberg FXGO
The first multi-dealer platform to connect directly to an FX derivatives clearing house, the ubiquitous terminal provider offers what are seen as the best research and analytics tools on the market. Its risk management tools are also widely praised.

Currenex
The State Street-owned, high-speed platform is a favourite of the leveraged trading community, and could be set for an influx of business from high-frequency trading firms locked out of other interdealer platforms.

FXall
The company enjoyed record volumes during 2012 after briefly going public in February, and has added a new suite of option contracts. The acquisition of the long-time market leader by Thomson Reuters in July has the potential to create a world-leader in both interbank and multi-dealer currency trading.

FX Connect
The State Street-owned institutional platform has made massive strides in market share during 2012, storming ahead of Bloomberg FXGO in the closely watched Euromoney FX poll of major multi-dealer platforms. In an increasingly scrutinised market, the platform’s integrated workflow and compliance solutions are widely praised as among the best in the market.

CME Clearing Europe
Launched in May last year, the CMECE is gaining traction: during the first six months of 2012 the clearing house cleared more than three times as many contracts, at 33,370, as it cleared from May to December last year.

Eurex Clearing
The Deutsche Börse-owned clearing house has won plaudits from clients for its move to real-time risk calculations and its leadership on client asset protection during the past year. The clearing house has also signed up the major dealers to support its push into over-the-counter interest rate swaps.

EuroCCP
The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation-owned equities clearing house has been at the forefront of the industry push towards clearing competition. As a result, the company has picked up a slew of new clients since July last year, including Bats-Chi-X Europe, UBS MTF, Burgundy and Equiduct, and now clears around a quarter of European equities volumes.

Ice Clear Europe
Europe’s premier credit default swap clearing house continues to pick up clients, has launched a new portfolio margining service, and is due to go live with over-the-counter FX clearing in coming weeks.

LCH.Clearnet
After putting a period of uncertainty behind it, Europe’s oldest clearing house has had a highly productive year, including upgrading SwapClear, the world’s premier interest rates swap clearing service, launching CDSClear internationally, and launching its new ForexClear for FX non-deliverable forwards.

Citi Client Money Segregation Web Portal
Amid rising fears regarding how derivatives dealers and clearing houses treat customer collateral, Citi launched the Citi Client Money Segregation web portal in July. The service gives investors a daily snapshot of their segregated balances at the bank, allowing them to track how their funds are distributed within the dealer and clearing houses’ own asset pools, how their assets are being reinvested and which custodians are safeguarding them.

Eurex ICM segregation
Launched in August last year, Eurex’s Individual Client Model segregation service has put the clearing house ahead of the pack when it comes to the segregation and protection of the customer funds. The new service allows full legal and operational segregation of all assets for its non-clearing members.

Full four-way Interoperability (Bats Chi-X Europe, EuroCCP, LCH.Clearnet, EMCF and Six x-clear)
In January, the industry saw the first instance of full four-way interoperability, whereby trading firms using Bats Chi-X Europe were offered a choice of the above four clearing firms for the first time. The service will help transform Europe’s clearing industry, bringing competition and reducing trading costs.

LCH.Clearnet ForexClear
LCH.Clearnet is determined to establish the same level of dominance in interbank currency derivatives clearing that the clearing house enjoys in the interest rate swaps market. The launch of ForexClear in March is widely regarded as a success story, with the service exceeding $50bn in cleared notional in just four months.

MarkitServ Clearing and Reporting Accessibility
The Markit Group-owned middleware provider has invested some $50m developing the MarkitServ product to ensure it becomes the de-facto provider of connectivity to Europe’s clearing houses. During the past year, MarkitServ has launched a clearing gateway service for OTC FX and has begun offering trade confirmations and trade identifiers for sending reports to trade repositories.

Calypso OTC Clearing & Processing
Calypso has become the industry’s most highly rated provider of post-trade risk management, clearing and margining services for both clearing houses and dealers, and is well-positioned to benefit from regulatory reform.

Clearstream Liquidity Hub Go
Launched in July last year, Clearstream’s Liquidity Hub Go provides collateral management services – including collateral allocation, optimisation and substitution – to central banks, central securities depositories and exchanges, without moving those assets out of the local domestic market.

Euroclear Collateral Highway
Launched in July, Euroclear’s “collateral highway” aggregates and pools collateral from a range of institutions, including agent banks, custodians, central securities depositories and clearing houses, so that it can be reallocated to required destinations. The service aims to address the growing collateral scarcity by preventing collateral silos.

Traiana, Harmony Credit Link
Launched last summer, the service provides the FX industry real-time risk management capabilities and controls to manage risks from algorithmic and high-frequency trading. Using Harmony Credit Link, FX brokers can monitor clients’ trading risk across multiple FX trading platforms and kill their trading activity if they breach their credit limits.

TriOptima TriBalance
Launched in April and developed in collaboration with nine of the most active OTC derivatives dealers, TriBalance reduces systemic risk by rebalancing counterparty credit exposure for cleared and uncleared OTC derivatives. The service addresses risk concentration, which occurs because credit exposure of cleared trades can no longer be netted against bilateral trades across different asset classes that are ineligible for clearing.

Michael Cooper, Chief Technology Officer, BT Radianz
Cooper, who looks after innovation and product development at BT Radianz, has been instrumental in the creation of the BT Radianz Cloud offering, which has taken off during the past year. Radianz also signed two big deals in recent months to provide access and connectivity to Singapore Exchange’s hubs in Chicago and London, and to provide managed hosting for the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and Clearing’s clients.

Yann L’Huillier, Group Chief Information Officer, Compagnie Financiere Tradition
L’Huillier, who joined the interdealer broker in 2010, and has played a key role in upgrading the firm’s trading infrastructure as it looks to position itself ahead of new regulations. He has overseen the development of a number of major projects, including the launch of new trading platforms Trad-X and traFXpure.

John Lowrey, Global Head of Electronic Product, Marex Spectron
A highly respected electronic trading expert, Lowrey was hired by the fast-growing commodities broker Marex Spectron last year. His impact has already been widely felt. He has helped to make the broker the first to co-locate its servers at the London Metal Exchange, shaving crucial seconds off client trading times, as well as overseeing the development of a high-speed link between Hong Kong and London.

Antoine Shagoury, Chief Information and Chief Operating Officer, London Stock Exchange
Winner of this award last year, Shagoury was promoted to chief operating officer in June. During the past year he has overseen the migration of the group’s Italian cash subsidiary onto MillenniumIT, along with the migration of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and the Mongolian Stock Exchange.

Michael Warren, Chief Technology Officer, London Metal Exchange (posthumous nominee)
Warren, who died tragically earlier this year, was instrumental in modernising the metal exchange, transforming it from a technology laggard into a premier trading venue. Last year, Warren oversaw the upgrading of the LMESelect platform and the introduction of proximity hosting to accommodate high-frequency traders.

Niki Beattie, Managing Director, Market Structure Partners
Formerly head of market structure at Merrill Lynch, Beattie is now a highly respected independent consultant, advising exchanges, trading venues, technology vendors and private equity firms on market structure and regulatory issues. In the past year, she has also taken on non-executive board roles at agency broker CA Cheuvreux, and the newly merged Russian exchange, RTS-Micex.

Diana Chan, Chief Executive, EuroCCP
EuroCCP has benefited from new clearing reforms which promise to bring competition to Europe’s clearing landscape and reduce overall trading costs. Chan has been campaigning for the reform for the past three years.

Lisa Dallmer, Chief Operating Officer, European Cash Markets and Head of European Market Services, NYSE Euronext
After rising up the ranks within NYSE, Dallmer was promoted to her current role in April last year. Dallmer is responsible for managing NYSE Euronext’s equity and fixed-income market operations in Europe and has been central to the company’s fight against encroaching competition from a number of alternative European trading venues.

Isabella Kurek-Smith, Director and Head of Freight and Energy, LCH.Clearnet
Head of one of LCH.Clearnet’s most profitable business units, Kurek-Smith has played a lead role in educating the market on the regulatory-driven migration towards clearing for over-the-counter swaps.

Kay Swinburne, Member of the European Parliament, Co-ordinator of the Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee
Swinburne’s influence over Mifid II was extensive. Her report on the subject, drawing input from market operators, participants and regulators, has shaped the European Commission’s thinking and she continues to feed into the legislative process. She is also rapporteur for the Central Securities Depository regulation.

Citi Client Money Segregation Web Portal
Amid rising fears regarding how derivatives dealers and clearing houses treat customer collateral, Citi launched the Citi Client Money Segregation web portal in July. The service gives investors a daily snapshot of their segregated balances at the bank, allowing them to track how their funds are distributed.

Full four-way Interoperability (Bats Chi-X Europe, EuroCCP, LCH.Clearnet, EMCF and Six x-clear)
In January, the industry saw the first instance of full four-way interoperability, whereby trading firms using Bats Chi-X Europe were offered a choice of the above four clearing firms for the first time.

Thomson Reuters Machine Readable News
Thomson Reuters extended its machine-readable news service in March to include sentiment information mined from millions of social media sites. The process involves assessing the sentiment, relevance and novelty of content to derive trading signals with respect to specific stocks and sectors. In June, the company integrated new psychological analysis functionality.

TriOptima TriBalance
Launched in April and developed in collaboration with nine of the most active OTC derivatives dealers, TriBalance reduces systemic risk by rebalancing counterparty credit exposure for cleared and uncleared OTC derivatives.

UBS Quant on Demand Studio
Launched in April, the UBS Quant on Demand Studio product iPad app allows the bank’s clients to build their own trading algorithms in collaboration with the UBS algo quant team. The use of the iPad as the distribution platform speeds up the development and customisation process. The app forms part of the Swiss bank’s “Quant on Demand” execution consulting platform, whereby it aims to makes its quantitative development capability directly available to clients.

Richard Balarkas, Formerly Chief Executive, Instinet Europe
An early pioneer of electronic trading, Balarkas was an architect of the London Stock Exchange’s first order-driven electronic trading platform and went on to help build Credit Suisse’s famous AES franchise. Balarkas has been an outspoken representative for the industry on a range of issues, from technological innovation to conflicts of interest.

Daemon Bear, Head of Execution Services, Olivetree Securities and Formerly Managing Director, Icap
A buyside veteran, Bear spent 10 years at JP Morgan Asset Management before moving onto the sellside. Bear is widely respected for his experience on both sides of the fence, and for his contribution to major industry debates regarding market structure and the evolution of equities trading.

Gay Huey Evans, Vice-Chairman of the Board and Non-executive Chairman of Europe, International Swaps and Derivatives Association
One of the City of London’s highest-profile female executives, Huey Evans plays a crucial role in the financial markets through her position at dealer lobby group ISDA. Huey Evans, who is a non-executive director of the LSE, has worked on the sellside and the buyside of the market, and from 1998 to 2005 was director of markets and capital markets sector leader at the Financial Services Authority in London.

Gil Mandelzis, Chief Executive, Icap EBS
Mandelzis’s Traiana platform laid the foundations for the FX prime brokerage industry as it exists today. Launched in 1999 with the support of the market’s largest currency dealer at the time, Deutsche Bank, Traiana offered dealers the first platform for automated post-trade credit checks, paving the way for a boom in FX as an investible asset class.

Lance Uggla, Chief Executive, Markit Group
Ten years ago, the Canadian-born chief executive recognised the need for reliable pricing in the credit default swap market, and went on to build Markit Partners – without which some credit traders claim there would be no CDS market at all. Today, Markit Group is a $4bn gorilla, offering a range of data, analytics and processing services designed to enhance transparency and reduce risk.