Eze Links with Trade Informatics for TCA

The addition of Trade Informatics’ software gives a view of transaction-cost analysis (TCA) that buy-side firms are increasingly interested in, owing to requirements under the revised Markets in Financial Instruments Directive, known as Mifid II, which will force firms to analyze their trading activity, in order to ensure that clients are getting the best possible execution of their orders. The package of rules is set to go live on January 3, 2018, and will dramatically change trading practices across nearly every asset class.

“There is certainly a Mifid II driver behind demand for TCA, but we’ve definitely seen demand for best execution measurement tools outside the Mifid II requirements as well, as a matter of best practice,” says Bill Neuman, head of product at Eze Software Group. “As asset owners demand more transparency from asset managers; being able to demonstrate best execution during due diligence calls is important.”

The new tools are available immediately, and follow a similar deal in March 2017, which saw Eze partner with OTAS Technologies for real-time analytics.

“Trade Informatics stood out as a great complement to our TCA tools with deep analytics and custom reports that extend our post-trade analytics capacity,” says Neuman. “What makes Trade Informatics unique is its ability to analyze a trader’s performance over a period of time and its consultative approach to helping clients understand the data. OTAS Analytics offers a complementary service, helping clients gather market intelligence about an issuer and market conditions before the trade, and then analyze performance in that context.”

This isn’t the first partnership that Eze has engaged in for TCA. In 2013, it signed an agreement with IHS Markit to integrate its pre-trade TCA offering into its order management system (OMS), shortly after the formation of the company through the combination of Eze Castle Software, RealTick and Tradar. The new partnership with Trade Informatics marks a continuing pattern of cooperation with third parties in the analytics space, as opposed to developing deep analytics of this variety in-house.

“Eze Software has always prided itself on being an open platform designed to work with multiple third parties. We believe in offering our clients a variety of choices in a seamless, integrated fashion. We’ve partnered with a number of third-party providers of TCA that are experts in their field and offer unique, valuable ways of assessing execution. We’ve chosen to focus on delivering those capabilities and making them easily accessible from our OMS and EMS, based on client preference,” Neuman adds.