FXaaS platform round-up: 5 new product features you need to know about

The day-to-day reality of software delivery is often a lot less glamorous than is portrayed by start-up hustle-culture influencers.

A new business with a good idea might spend 20% of its time on developing the features that make it unique. The remaining effort is usually spent removing blockers for new customers to say yes. These blockers are often unsexy, standard features of platform maturity - think user permissions, or ISO security requirements, or data export functionality.

But in amongst the less newsworthy items, there are still some exciting things to shout about. Here’s a round-up of new functionality from the last year.

 

In this blog:

• Automatic counterparty assignment
• Assessing position impact pre-trade
• Flexible reports
• Approvals and selecting an execution time
• Fat finger limits
• Where next?

 

Automatic counterparty assignment

Whilst the name is not the sexiest, this is one of our best “do the work so that the user doesn’t have to” features.

We’re very proud of the transparency and competition that our multi-bank platform brings to our clients. Many of them did not previously have access to more than one bank or broker. However, no good deed goes unpunished - access to multiple counterparties comes with possible settlement headaches.

If you open a position via MillTechFX and subsequently close it, you would expect to only pay or receive a lower order Profit and Loss payment. But what if the open and close trades go to different banks? No-one wants to have to move substantial amounts of cash around on settlement date, for a net payment that is several orders of magnitude less.

With our automated counterparty assignment (ACA) logic, we remove this potential cash movement nightmare. Close trades are systematically split and allocated across banks with open positions, to ensure that cash movements are minimised. Clients don’t need to do anything - just upload their trades as usual and away we go.

 

Assessing position impact pre-trade

Every file of trades that gets uploaded to our platform is rigorously checked by our validation & compliance engine. This checks for inconsistent data or disallowed activity.

But one of the hardest things for us to validate is the trade amount. Other than limit ceilings, it’s hard to assess the validity of the numbers without understanding the intent.

So instead we added position impact information to the trade review screen for clients. Users can see what their current position is, their uploaded trade amount, the new position that would be created if executed, and a text summary of the impact.

It’s much easier to scan down a column of words like “New”, “Increase” or “Close out” than it is to compare numbers across multiple screens!

 

Flexible reports

We offer a range of standardised reports for clients, which can be accessed in the portal or sent via email or SFTP.

However, sometimes clients need data exports in a particular structure (often to match an import format for an existing system). In the past this would have represented a bespoke build for us, which is tricky to manage alongside an already full product development roadmap.

So instead we’ve built a flexible reporting module, that allows us to easily map any of our data to a client spec. And crucially, it’s all driven by config - no need for writing, testing or deploying code each time we get a new client request.

 

Approvals and selecting an execution time

For a long time we used a rather simple method for selecting benchmark execution times - a free text field to write in their preferred fix, which our Operations team would read and assign accordingly. Very easy to deliver; not so easy to scale!

Adding in proper benchmark selection is a non-trivial problem, however. What happens if a client submits a file only a few minutes before the benchmark? Or uploads a draft batch before the cut-off, but fails to approve and submit in time?

We wanted to preserve the flexibility that came with our original human-driven process, so we settled on two cut-offs: one for guaranteeing a benchmark (1 hour before) and another for submission entirely (20 minutes before).

New email reminders for draft batches still awaiting approval completes a comprehensive upgrade of approval and submission of orders on our platform.

 

Fat finger limits

Sometimes the smallest features can have the largest impact on users. Fat finger limits are (optional) thresholds that prevent clients from accidentally executing trades above their typical ticket size.

Clients can opt for different limit sizes per portfolio and can also select certain super users to be able to approve above the limits, for exceptional trades.

As a SaaS finance platform, we always need to balance removing UX friction with not introducing risk. A little friction can go a long way to preventing typos from turning into trading errors.

 

Where next?

Look out for upcoming updates on our exciting round of next products and features - such as REST APIs & FIX connectivity to allow for automated orders submission and post trade integrations. Along with new services to calculate services to automatically determine hedge trades.