Fidessa AMS is a new class of application that automates the workflow for direct trade affirmation between the buy-side and sell-side, delivering a faster, cheaper and more accurate alternative to current solutions. It also complements Fidessa's existing sell-side community and its FIX-based Post-trade Hub launched last year.

The post-trade space is characterised by expensive, proprietary, outmoded technology or time-consuming, inefficient manual processes. Its lack of close integration with the rest of the business often means that important information, such as details around commission and market charge calculations, is lost too. And for many years, post-trade processing has been running flat out, with more and more manpower being used just to maintain the status quo and cover for these inefficiencies and inadequacies. Shorter settlement times and new regulations are set to push this situation to breaking point, and Fidessa has found that many firms are urgently re-assessing their post-trade operations as a result. 

Fidessa AMS allows buy-sides to interact directly and seamlessly over FIX with the global broker community. This direct, bilateral approach means affirmations can be processed more quickly and efficiently. Avoiding manpower-heavy manual processes or proprietary, centralised solutions, allows considerable cost savings to be made as well. The use of FIX is also beneficial as it follows the natural direction of business flow and so allows other valuable and currently lost information to persist from the front office to the back office, eliminating the need to maintain information in multiple locations and improving accuracy.

Steve Grob, Group Strategy Director at Fidessa, comments: "Larger, pioneering buy-side firms have driven the use of FIX for direct post-trade processing with brokers, and it was in support of this that we launched our Post-trade Hub last year. However, for mass adoption to take place, most firms need a solution for the workflow involved in direct trade matching, and it was the recognition of this that led us to develop Fidessa AMS."

Fidessa AMS provides a holistic view of the broker community in the same way that an execution management service (EMS) does for order routing and execution. AMS simplifies the whole process and removes the need for multiple systems, so unifying post-trade operations to achieve levels of efficiency that have previously been unattainable.

David Pearson, Strategic Business Architect at Fidessa and Co-chair of the FIX Trading Community Post-trade Working Group, adds: "The move to T+2 settlement in Europe in October this year will herald the start of yet more scrutiny by all sizes of buy-side firms of their post-trade operations, as they strive to adhere to this and cope with the other evolving regulations that are expected. It is exactly these demands that AMS is addressing, providing the operational tools that will radically improve the post-trade process."