Nick Solinger, President and CEO of FIA Tech said: “We are extremely grateful to be recognised as Clearing House Support Product of the Year and would like to thank the judges and our customers for their support. The award reflects our commitment to operational efficiency and reducing risk in the ETD market. The Trade Data Network has begun to revolutionise ETD operations and we are proud to have the support of so many leading buyside, sellside firms and exchanges as we launched the initiative”.

The ETD market has long struggled with a lack of transparency and high volumes of varied and inconsistent data, with multiple sources, formats, timings, and standards. This hampers the accurate exchange of data and requires manual processes and duplicative reconciliations, making communication between participants slow and difficult. As a result, clearing and allocation systems are complex, inefficient, and error-prone.

In response to these challenges, FIA Tech launched its TDN solution in October 2022. TDN integrates disparate post-trade ETD data in real time from multiple sources, including executing brokers, CCPs, clearing brokers and clients. It creates a single trade lineage in a common, secure, standards-based ledger. This provides market participants with a unified, “golden source” of data that is accessible, easy-to-use, and transparent.

The solution helps to minimise clearing delays and reduce costs with standardised, efficient processes, including allocation, confirmation and resolution. These streamlined processes and greater transparency into the status of a trade reduce the risks of the give-up process.

Consistent data and in-built collaboration processes also mean that trade and allocation breaks can be quickly identified and resolved, significantly reducing the frequency of interventions. FIA Tech reports that allocation and trade breaks for users can be reduced from as high as 20% to almost zero. Where intervention is required, TDN’s collaborative approach to communication between counterparties allows firms to share details of trade breaks and complete break resolution in real time. Clients using TDN for fees and commission calculation and tracking are also reportedly seeing brokerage fee breaks slashed to close to zero.

By capturing data on each step of the trade lifecycle, TDN can provide both buy-side and sell-side firms with benchmarks and insights on performance, identifying opportunities for improvement. It also ensures quicker recovery and increased resilience in the face of any future systemic outages, by providing a comprehensive solution to collate, store, and backup all trade data in a format that is usable and accessible.

Working directly with the leading software vendors and data providers, TDN allows each market participant to seamlessly interoperate using their own trading and clearing systems. Participants can easily integrate and normalise their data via the TDN Gateway infrastructure, and communicate with other market participants. FIA Tech has also embedded the FIX protocol and FIA’s Derivatives Market Institute for Standards (DMIST) 30-30-30 standards for allocations and give-ups into the network to standardize as well as drive interoperability with existing execution, clearing and post-trade platforms.

Funded by the market, TDN is already supported by over 20 banks/brokers and 40 investment managers/hedge funds with a total AUM of $34 trillion. It has a comprehensive and growing connectivity to multiple exchanges and CCPs, covering 80% of the global futures flow.