Trader TV catches up with leading market participants and organisers at this year’s Trade Tech FX in Amsterdam, hosted by Worldwide Business Research (WBR). The speakers cover TTFX’s expanding digital assets focus and how peer-to-peer insight, data intelligence, predictive analytics and automation are shaping trading and execution across FX workflows.
Interview
Josephine Gallagher – Welcome to Trader TV. We’re here at Trade Tech FX in Amsterdam, and I’m joined by Henry Wallis, head of strategy for the financial services business at WBR. Henry, it’s lovely to see you.
Henry Wallis, WBR – Good to see you, Jo, as always.
Josephine Gallagher – As always, indeed. So we’re obviously here at Trade Tech FX, and there’s a massive presence for this conference. How has it changed since last year?
Henry Wallis, WBR – Well, the main change. Well, there are two main changes. So the first thing you probably noticed is that we’ve folded the digital assets content into TradeTechFX. So we have a whole track of digital assets content running co-located with Trade Tech FX, and that’s a big change for us. And next year, digital assets will be its own track under the umbrella of Trade Tech FX. So that’s a kind of agenda content-related change we’re very excited about and then secondly, one of the biggest changes with regard to the audience is we’ve had a significant increase in the number of corporate treasurers coming. So I think we had 30 last year, and we have 90 this year. So then the number of corporate treasurers has kind of tripled from last year to this year. So that’s very exciting too.
Josephine Gallagher – So we’re here, obviously, at Trade Tech FX. Tell us, what are some of the key takeaways you’ve taken from this event?
Stefan Helber, Deutsche Asset Management – I think one of the main interests is always to see what’s on top of the mind of your peers, and check whether you have the same topics or where you differ, because that generates very interesting insights on your own decision-making progress. Because ultimately, I mean, either you see that there are different solutions out there that you haven’t thought about, or that you’re on the right track and you should follow down that road. So I think that’s one of the key benefits I always see in talking to peers and having exchanges with others at these events.
Josephine Gallagher – The networking ability is invaluable, of course.
Josephine Gallagher – Yeah, AI is definitely a big theme at this conference for sure.
Joe Forde, Brown Brother Harriman – Yeah.
Josephine Gallagher – And you are on the data intelligence panel, so tell us what were some of the key learnings from that?
Joe Forde, Brown Brothers Harriman – You know what we’re seeing now is that we’re well beyond TCA (Transaction Cost Analysis) being just a tick-box learning exercise. Like, what we’re seeing is this full-circle approach of how people are actually taking these post-trade learnings and adapting how they approach the next trade. So we’re seeing this circular motion of, you know, trade, post-trade, learn, adapt the next execution, and then we’re seeing this continually improve over time the way people approach their next trade, their next execution, and how we’re taking TCA now and using it to actively solve problems. We’re not at a point, and I don’t think we’ll be at a point, where we can predict accurately, you know, what counterparty is going to win a trade, but we are getting close to a point where we’re kind of actively curating panels, or we’re kind of able to accurately predict what’s going to go on during a trade.
Josephine Gallagher – Okay, another panel I was listening to today talked a lot about obviously the automation, and so are you also seeing that kind of predictive analytics, that kind of post- and pre-trade analytics being used to funnel back into the execution engine from an automated standpoint?
Joe Forde, Brown Brothers Harriman – Yeah, we are seeing that. I think you’re seeing that. I mean, everyone’s got their own different approaches. Like real money has a different approach to being highly systematic. Like seeing highly systematic funds take that approach, where it is fully automated all the way through, and then you’re seeing real money. You’re seeing other participants taking a more nuanced approach, a more manual approach, where they’re, you know, we’ve got a lot of trades that we have to actively manually intervene with, and so you’re kind of seeing a more manual approach to pre-trade there. But, you know, it’s we’ve got so many participants, and everyone’s taking a different approach. And I think that’s interesting that there’s no uniform approach to trade analytics.
