About the Client
The client is a capital markets company that provides trading, investment, clearing, and execution solutions. It was established in the late 90s in Chicago, Illinois to serve customers in the United States. The client’s main investing focuses are financial derivatives such as debts and equity.
Business Challenge
The client has an order execution desk with designated employees who were intermediaries between the client’s external partners and internal traders.
There are over 60 external partners represented by banks, investment funds, and brokers. They are united in a private chat where they generate trading ideas and strategies and share them with the client’s designated employees. Following that, the client’s internal traders execute the orders. While that’s happening, the client’s internal traders generate and share trading strategies for external partners in their own internal chat with the client’s same designated representatives. The latter then communicate these ideas to external partners for confirmation and execution.
Thus, the designated representatives manually processed these trading ideas and strategies, brought them together in an Excel file, and communicated between the involved parties. Manually tracking all these trading ideas and strategies was inefficient. One idea or strategy took more than two minutes to process, and over 200 ideas were generated daily. The volume was continuously growing and the time expenditure became unsustainable. The client did not want to miss any trading opportunities because of a high inflow of ideas and strategies, as the market is constantly changing. So they requested a solution that limited idea and strategy processing to no more than 30 seconds. The client required the whole process to be automated, thereby minimizing the manual work and uniting all functions into one solution. It was also essential to track the history of all interactions, analyze statistics case by case, and study any occurring issues.
Solution
The client chose Devexperts to take on this project because of their strong work ethic and a successful track record of developing complex fintech solutions.
Developing the entire solution from scratch took six months. Devexperts was introduced to the client’s internal processes to better understand the challenge. The solution was also partially developed on the client’s premises in cooperation with their quality assurance and maintenance teams.
Devexperts primarily developed the solution’s back- and frontend. The solution maintains a record of all requests and interactions, traces new messages, trading ideas and strategies, and immediately communicates them to internal traders.
The solution was then integrated with the client’s infrastructure and trading system to automatically send trade requests for subsequent execution. The internal traders also received a version of the solution, which disposed them of their internal chat and allowed them to send trade requests directly to it and then, upon confirmation, to the client’s trading system.
The only issue left was to automate communication with external partners. Devexeperts integrated their chat with the newly developed solution, so the designated employees could see messages in one workspace and reply to them. To solve the issue of manually processing trading ideas and strategies coming from the external chat, Devexperts created a parsing add-on. The add-on was also integrated with the solution, allowing all messages from the external partners to be automatically parsed and transformed into a trade request form. The internal traders were then able to review these trade requests and automatically send them to the order execution desk.
Results
Devexperts has developed a solution that automates the order execution desk workflow, reducing the time required for processing a single trade idea or strategy from 2+ minutes to 30 seconds. The solution ensures that the client never misses out on any trading opportunities. It is also designed to record all interactions, analyze statistics case by case, and study any recurring issues.