Reaching across buy- and sell-side has won popular support for TS Imagine in connecting front offices.
TS Imagine has won the votes of traders on both sides of the street by directly addressing the challenges its clients face, and thinking about them holistically in order to make its solutions viable for both banks and investment firms. There is also a certain amount of scepticism about the role of execution management systems (EMSs) in fixed income markets which firms such as TS Imagine need to overcome in order to get traction in the front office.
The winner of Best Fixed Income EMS in 2023 leapt that barrier through its holistic offering, giving it the ability to support clients with many varied issues, innovation and investment in talent.
Andrew Morgan, president and chief revenue officer at TS Imagine says, “Sell-side firms have always been big clients and, when a buy-side customer comes to us, we can get them access to all the liquidity that they need across our trading and venue network. What happened recently – in the two years in full lockdown with Covid – was a hockey-stick-shaped adoption of digital trading and electronic trading techniques. That was driven by venues and dealers innovating, alongside a shift in buy-side appetite for more digital solutions.”
Through its roles in the front, middle and back offices of banks and investment firms, and simple deployment as a software-as-a-service platform, TS Imagine was well positioned to tap into that change he asserts, and ensured it had the services needed to deliver.
“We were an enabler in the middle of all of that,” he says. “We offer workflow automation, liquidity aggregation and access to the network. To facilitate connectivity, dealers certify via an offering called Direct Dealer Connectivity, where sell-side firms are delivering liquidity into the platform and players have the ability to interact with that liquidity. It’s been an important ingredient in the recipe. When TradingScreen and Imagine Software were bought we had a low single digit number of fixed income clients live, and now we’re well into the mid-40s, over the course of just a couple of years.”
The path to success hinges on tapping into the zeitgeist and with digital techniques becoming critical in supporting the trading function, productivity and risk management for the sell side, TS Imagine is also building that same appetite within its buy-side client base and supporting them in order to encourage others.
“We’re looking at innovative ways to get liquidity to clients while their own digital transformation is focused on smarter ways of dealing,” he says. “The bilateral, analogue legacy way of doing things in fixed income is very much a thing of the past. It’s just a question of how far along that curve everybody has gotten. Some sell-side firms are really driving it with their clients and have engaged very proactively with us.”
The merger between the two firms has allowed the combined entity to resource the business, building a large development centre in Montreal and expanding the team from five to 65 employees, and hiring 170 new people across the firm.
“We find talented, ambitious, high energy people and we have promoted people that are ready to do more; liberated people that always had the energy and ambition and ideas but hadn’t quite got the resources to pursue initiatives,” Morgan explains.
With data at the core of challenges facing many clients, the firm has also developed that internal talent base to support and optimise data use and management within firms.
“Working with some of the biggest hedge funds and prime brokers on the street we have a very demanding client base. They need very robust and clean, complete data, both in terms of reference data and real time data. We have a data office to manage that with over 50 people in it and we’ve hired a chief data officer who’s an industry veteran with experience of data coverage across every asset class. It takes a major headache away from the client’s standpoint, because the stitching together of disparate data sources is one of the things that just kills a firm’s efficiency and decision making.”
Getting close to clients has also enabled the firm to optimise the breadth of its offering in order to tackle specific challenges for clients.
“Often the best way to build product with an awesome product market fit is to partner with a customer that has something specific that they’re looking to solve,” he notes. “Over two and a half years a number of clients have come to us with a specific challenge and decided that a better all-round solution to help them to futureproof their business, is to work across asset classes in a single system, as they handle the different levels of electronification in fixed income and equities which makes the completeness we support, super powerful.”
Returning to the issue of scepticism, Morgan is aware that any investment needs to be justified and says focusing on value-added services that both reduce cost and can generate returns for users is allowing TS Imagine to grow in the fixed income space where desktop fragmentation is a major source of friction for trading and best execution.
“A customer told us they thought they could cover the licence cost of our software with today’s activity because of the ability it gives them to capture alpha, spread, and to trade and find liquidity that would otherwise be easy to miss if managed manually,” he says. “Technology scales far better than humans do and if we can empower people with the right systems and access to tools that make them more productive and efficient, then the technology pays for itself.”
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