Turquoise Plato connects to OpenFin for unified buy-side trader desktop

By Edlyn Cardoza

OpenFin, the operating system (OS) for enterprise productivity, recently announced that LSEG’s (London Stock Exchange Group) Turquoise Plato is connecting to OpenFin in response to the industry need for workflow efficiencies, application interoperability, and a more unified desktop experience for the buy-side and member firm users.

Turquoise has a proven track record in delivering innovation and liquidity opportunities to the market, with Turquoise Plato Block Discovery™ having seen record levels of block trading activity on Turquoise® and Turquoise Europe™ in 2020. With this collaboration, Turquoise is continuing to deliver on its mission to identify efficient, collaborative operating models that reduce the implicit cost of trading, contribute to long-term investment returns and drive sustainable growth.

Turquoise on OpenFin™ delivers an insightful data feed directly into trader workflows to support liquidity discovery and decision-making processes leveraging OpenFin’s open architecture. The API passes FDC3 compliant Context objects and makes use of OpenFin’s message bus to pass that data to OpenFin-enabled applications including visualization tools, in-house and 3rd party applications.

Dr Robert Barnes, Group Head of Securities Trading & CEO of Turquoise Global Holdings, LSEG, said: “As a market operator, Turquoise is well positioned to bring the industry together around a common ambition: to collaborate, innovate and to improve efficiencies on traders’ desktops. This will not only support best execution efforts but also improve performance for end investors as it helps us reduce the slippage cost at the point of execution. We are delighted Turquoise® and Turquoise Europe™ are the first trading venues to connect to OpenFin and offer this new functionality to the buy-side.”

Adam Toms, European CEO of OpenFin, commented: “We are witnessing a continued shift towards more collaborative mindsets and platforms. With forward thinking firms such as Turquoise working with the industry to create solutions that make the financial desktop more intuitive, automated, and powerful, firms can unlock the true potential of interoperability and contextual workflows on their financial desktop. Operational complexity and costs arising from bilateral integrations are fast becoming a thing of the past as users can now access the right tools and data sets, surfaced directly into their workflows, delivering powerful capabilities and tangible results.”

Toms added: “Collaboration and innovation are central to our mission to simplify app distribution, unify the digital workspace and enable seamless communication and workflows between applications. We are very excited to be working with Turquoise to bring new, visionary models of collaboration to life and to market.”

OpenFin provides a common web-based OS layer across the financial services industry to power next-generation applications and desktop experiences. OpenFin technology is deployed on 300,000 desktops across the industry, powering over 3,500 applications in more than 2,400 buy-side and sell-side firms in 60+ countries.

FlexTrade Systems will be the first to deliver the Turquoise data feed into their flagship EMS via the OpenFin message bus. Traders can then act on that data, automate processes, and take advantage of emerging liquidity opportunities. Built-in visualization capabilities ensure the block trading activity from Turquoise Plato Order Books™ is easy to digest and subsequently interact with.

Andy Mahoney, managing director EMEA at FlexTrade Systems, added: “We are delighted to work with Turquoise and OpenFin to support liquidity discovery and execution opportunities, and bring tangible benefits to the buy-side trading desk. It helps our clients customize their execution workflows, perform optimally on every trade and achieve best execution without compromise.”