Charles River Development, a leading provider of fixed income order management systems (OMS) to the global investment management community, today announced that the Charles River Investment Management System (Charles River IMS) has enabled its first live link to the MarketAxess trading platform.
MarketAxess operates one of the leading platforms for the electronic trading of corporate bonds and certain other types of fixed-income securities, serving as an electronic platform through which its more than 500 active institutional investor clients can access the liquidity provided by its 22 broker dealer clients.
Clients using the interface have immediate access to MarketAxess' US and European high-grade corporate, crossover, agency and emerging markets bond liquidity directly from the Charles River Trader blotter, a key component of Charles River IMS. Putnam Investments is live and three additional clients are undergoing implementation.
"We are very pleased with the electronic interface between Charles River's and MarketAxess' respective services," said Paul Quistberg, chief operating officer of fixed income at Putnam Investments. "Not only are we achieving faster times to market, but we have automated and streamlined a very time-consuming manual process. This type of STP initiative enables our traders to handle just the exceptions rather than single trade processing, giving them more time to create value for our clients."
The FIX-based interface handles generic orders, solicited orders and unsolicited orders originating in Charles River Trader, which facilitates electronic trading and order management across multiple trading desks, all security types and time zones. Charles River Compliance, a real-time compliance monitor that is also part of Charles River IMS, ensures all trades are compliant with various account, portfolio-level and enterprise-wide rules prior to execution. The outcome is a controlled trading environment where investment managers can monitor fixed income trading compliance in real time. Charles River Manager, the third component of Charles River IMS, provides advanced portfolio management capabilities.
Charles River also announced today that its Charles River Investment Management System (Charles River IMS) is the first OMS to automate and streamline fixed income trading with a live execution and allocation link to TradeWeb, the leading network of online fixed income markets.
Five clients, including PRP Performa Limited Ltd., an institutional fixed income manager based in Bermuda with $1.2 billion assets under management, are using the FIX interface between the two systems. Six additional clients in the US, UK and Germany are undergoing implementation.
Charles River was the first OMS vendor to partner with Thomson TradeWeb, operator of TradeWeb and part of The Thomson Corporation (NYSE: TOC, TSX: TOC), to create an innovative front, middle and back-office workflow solution for the fixed income market. A FIX interface between Charles River IMS and TradeWeb enables investment managers to originate fixed income block trades in Charles River IMS and send them seamlessly for execution to TradeWeb's online fixed income markets. Charles River IMS is a comprehensive, front and middle office software suite for portfolio management (Charles River Manager), order management and electronic trading (Charles River Trader), and real-time compliance monitoring (Charles River Compliance).
TradeWeb provides liquidity access to 32 major dealers in US treasuries, agencies, TBA-MBS, interest rate swaps, corporate bonds, commercial paper, agency discount notes, European governments, pfandebriefe, supras, and European commercial paper. The electronic link also facilitates the transmission of allocations originating in Charles River IMS to TradeWeb. Following execution, TradeWeb enhances the trade and allocations with standing settlement instructions that map directly into major dealers' settlement systems. TradeWeb delivers an electronic acknowledgement of the completed block trade and allocations back to Charles River IMS, facilitating paperless trade processing.
In addition, Charles River IMS clients can receive electronic block trade confirmation and allocation detail from TradeWeb for trades completed over the telephone. "This interface harnesses all the power offered by TradeWeb, including direct corporate phone trades with brokers and even trades executed on other platforms, as well as the full power of the real-time Charles River Compliance engine – the result is true STP integration in a global, virtual office environment," said Shawn Murphy, chief investment officer and head of fixed income at PRP Performa. "For example, we can accomplish time critical CP trading knowing that we are compliant with S&P AAAm requirements and also achieve fast, accurate STP for error free cash settlements."
The interface is available to clients using Charles River IMS version 7.2.2 and higher.