FlexTrade integrates with Appital’s Bookbuilding platform via LSEG’s Turquoise

Appital is a UK-based marketplace bidding to unlock what it calls ‘the latent liquidity’ in equity capital markets. Through a series of integrations with financial institutions and technology vendors, its platform enables buy-side firms to gain greater exposure to deal flow and execution opportunities in illiquid small and mid-cap stocks.

This collaboration means Appital users can access FlexTRADER’s functionality, which offers a customizable execution management system (EMS) with pre-defined trading strategies and tactics for portfolio and single stock trading across all asset classes.  It also ensures that mutual clients benefit from a standardized interface between the two platforms, which will provide scalability and reduce costs.

Appital says this alliance brings innovation to equity capital markets, which it describes as an area largely untouched by automation and often plagued by opaque legacy processes. More specifically, buy-side firms will have access to the liquidity on Turquoise, LSEG’s pan-European MTF, which brings straight-through-processing (STP) to over 20 settlement venues.

The integration with FlexTrade’s FlexTRADER EMS also further validates Appital’s technology infrastructure, which aims to enable the buy-side community to execute large orders with minimal market impact or risk of price erosion.

FlexTrade’s product suite offers access to market data providers while ‎‎easily integrating with any order management system (OMS) via FIX and ‎‎API. Global investment managers prefer the solution since the consolidation of equities, FX, listed options, futures, or any combination is essential on the same platform in order to ensure smooth functioning. The multi-asset execution management system can also be tailored for global access to broker algorithms, as well as the ability to build proprietary algorithms.

Andy Mahoney, Managing Director EMEA FlexTrade Systems, commented: “This integration with Appital brings transparency and automation to an area of the market traditionally plagued by opacity and outdated, phone based bookbuilding activity. We see significant demand for Appital’s offering from some of our largest asset management customers. As a result, we have been collaborating with Appital to develop standard integration procedures to ensure our clients have seamless access to Appital’s platform directly within the FlexTRADER EMS order blotter to actively participate in the liquidity discovery process in the market for size.”

Mark Badyra, CEO of Appital, added: “In our mission to put buy-side firms in control of their bookbuilding activity we are excited to work with innovative firms like FlexTrade to help us shape the technology infrastructure for EMS integrations. FlexTrade clients and the asset management community can now gain exposure to deal flow opportunities they have not been able to access before. This integration transforms a traditionally manual order flow process, that historically sits outside any EMS, into an automated, electronic platform.”