Lightning FX – Tradepoint Systems

Tradepoint’s flagship product, Lightning FX, delivers bespoke foreign exchange solutions for the front office. Customers use Lightning FX for both taking liquidity from providers such as banks and ECNs and for making liquidity markets for customers. On the taking side, Lightning FX provides normalized access to liquidity pools, aggregation and trade execution, internalization, derived crosses, an algorithmic execution framework, risk management, and dealer desktop user interfaces and control. When making markets for liquidity customers, Lightning FX performs source price discovery, aggregation and cleansing, customer price creation, tiering and markup, distribution, automated order handling, manual intervention, risk hedging, and customer analytics.

Lightning FX has a diverse pool of customers including the world’s largest banks, regional banks and buy-side organizations. While no two Lightning FX solutions are identical, several commonalities have yielded the product categorizations below.

Aggregator

Aggregator is a full aggregation solution for foreign exchange and similar asset classes. It offers visual and API access to all of a customer’s available liquidity from banks, ECNs, non-banks and bespoke liquidity providers. Execution algorithms protect liquidity relationships while achieving best execution across the distributed market. Derived synthetic currency pairs and internalization offer a deeper view of liquidity than the market otherwise supports.

Aggregator integrates with bank components such as OMS and tick capture systems.

eCommerce Solution

eCommerce Solution enables banks and other liquidity providers to service their electronic foreign exchange customers, creating core price streams, tiering and marking up streams, distributing data to customers via multibank portals and direct APIs, filling order flow, hedging risk, and performing customer analysis.

eCommerce Solution may be provided standalone or it may be integrated with existing bank and third-party components, enabling firms to leverage legacy components and value-added IP.

Dealer Desktop

Dealer Desktop is a graphical user interface (GUI) for foreign exchange aggregation and trading which can plug and play with any technology that provides access to liquidity sources, including non-Tradepoint solutions. It enables dealers to visualize and interact with the aggregated market, offering SDP-like simplicity, native keypad support, and efficient GUI layouts which help consolidate desktop application usage.

Dealer Desktop has only one job: providing the richest possible front-end experience to demanding currency traders, with the understanding that every pixel and key press must be maximally efficient and intuitive.

Venue Connectivity

Venue Connectivity provides normalized connectivity to foreign exchange liquidity providers and distribution channels with very low latency, offered as both deployed software and a managed, hosted service. Liquidity providers can be added and removed quickly, to adjust rapidly to changes in the fragmented landscape of the foreign exchange marketplace. Normalized market access allows a business to focus on core goals without getting mired in the nuanced differences between liquidity providers in protocols and market models.

Algorithm Container

Algorithm Container & Java API allows customers to extend Tradepoint’s execution algorithms and create wholly proprietary strategies. The container enables customers to start from a market-ready set of code for both algorithms and unit tests, including smart order router (SOR) strategies for taking liquidity and posting liquidity, as well as a variety of longer-lived strategies ranging from passive to aggressive. The framework includes tools for reacting to changing market conditions by measuring the real-time responsiveness of liquidity providers, utilizing the internalizer for iceberg and posted liquidity, and interacting with synthetically derived currency pairs.