Live report from London – Saxo Bank’s senior executives launch all new institutional platform at City Hall

A very important perspective, long held by FinanceFeeds, is the importance of developing, maintaining and operating in-house proprietary trading infrastructure that encompasses the trading interface, hosting, servers, market connectivity.

Now, in today’s extremely competitive electronic trading business, having a specific value proposition which engages traders of all levels, from all backgrounds and in all regions with innate flexibility, combined with the ability to self-determine as a fully comprehensive commercial entity is vital.

This evening, here at City Hall, on the South Bank of the River Thames in Central London, the absolute epicenter of the world’s financial markets and all that connects to them, technology focused electronic trading company Saxo Bank officially launched its all new institutional trading platform, SaxoTraderPRO, with FinanceFeeds being the very first B2B reporting and editorial company to have seen the trading system in its finalized form, connected to a live trading environment.

Joining Saxo Bank’s senior executives for the world premiere of the new SaxoTraderPRO platform were 120 invitees, ranging from high net worth private clients to institutional traders and hedge fund managers, as well as corporate partners who operate professional trading entities.

The launch of a new trading platform is a rare occurrence indeed, and despite the financial markets business being completely dependent on continual innovation and has its entire topography built around online connectivity to live markets globally, there is still a massive reliance on third party platforms, hence this particular event marks a milestone in the development of trading infrastructure.

Commencing the launch of the SaxoTraderPRO platform was London-based Saxo Capital Markets CEO Andrew Edwards, who welcomed institutional partners and private clients, and expressed his perspective that the UK is a very important market for Saxo Bank and especially for SaxoTraderPRO, largely due to the proliferation of sophisticated traders that operate across the United Kingdom. Mr Edwards also underlined that this is a very interesting time for Saxo Bank, not least because of the new ESMA regulations, expressing that the company envisages new growth opportunities within this new regulatory environment.

Following Mr Edwards’ introduction was Saxo Bank CEO and co-founder Kim Fournais, who has long held the need to develop disruptive and innovative financial technology solutions in house as a mainstay of the company’s business activity since its founding in 1992.

Mr Fournais gave an overview of the history of Saxo Bank, beginning from his co-founding of the company more than 25 years ago, also showing a photo of the company’s very first proprietary trading platform which was launched in 1998, some 20 years ago.

Mr Fournais underlined that the tading technology of the platforms have always been the core of Saxo Bank’s commercial ethos, stating that the company’s senior management are very proud to have launched the new SaxoTraderPRO product which is tailored to active traders and institutional clients.

Recently, Mr Fournais detailed this to FinanceFeeds by explaining in his notably enthusiastic manner, “In operating as a true multi-asset provider, our aim is to cater for the specialties of each of the asset classes because, for example, an equities trader is not like a futures trader or an FX trader, therefore we must engineer our trading platform so that it meets the needs of each type of trader, which is an important aspect, but the entire environment needs to be in one place, on one platform.”

“We launched our first proprietary trading platform in 1998, thus we became a fintech firm before the term was created” – Kim Fournais, CEO, Saxo Bank

Understanding the roots of such a finely honed trading system is critical, however at the very leading edge of the development of the SaxoTraderPRO system is Christian Hammer, Senior Vice President and Head of Platforms at Saxo Bank, based in Hellerup, Denmark at the firm’s global headquarters.

This evening, Mr Hammer conducted the first trades on the platform, demonstrating its functionality in a live trading environment to the esteemed audience, with FinanceFeeds having been party to the first operation of the platform in the public domain.

Mr Hammer’s demonstration included full definition of SaxoTraderPRO’s design and ergonomic interface with traders, including some new functionality that is designed with the requirements of advanced traders in mind.

A number of new risk tools were explained in detail, along with some of the many new reporting functionalities for private clients to be able to onbtain a breakdown of their profit and loss in a granular fashion, with information that can be broken down via asset classes, and where all trading data can be segmented.

“Looking back at our origins, we came from trading and became multi-asset really early but it is very complicated to build a platform where everything can be traded on one account” – Kim Fournais, CEO, Saxo Bank

Mr Hammer showed specific abilities that traders now have within the platform, an example being when trading equities, traders can now place trades directly within the order book. This means that traders are now able to see their orders on the exchanges and use this information that they have access to when placing orders. Just like trading direclty within charts, traders can now actually look inside the order book and place the trades directly in the order book.

Following Mr Hammer’s demonstration was Saxo Bank’s Chief Investment Officer Steen Jacobsen, who looked at how SaxoTraderPRO empowers advanced traders when navigating market events.

In terms of multi-asset capability, it was fitting that Mr Jacobsen elaborated on what is known as the FANG stocks, that being an acronym for  Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Alphabet (previously Google, hence the G abbreviation) and how these companies and their interaction with their customers are important entities to look at when defining the future of the listed derivatives market.

Mr Jacobsen explained that due to the real-estate-free nature of today’s vast internet companies, data is the intellectual property that counts and can move markets. Companies like Facebook and Google have sparked current discussions about privacy, as the data that they store about people is comprehensive this is a big challenee not only for these companies harboring info but also for democracy in general.

Mr Jacobsen then moved on to talk about a new indicator that Saxo Bank has compiled called Credit Impulse, which shows the change in lending via available credit in the global financial markets as an indicator for the performance of the credit market 6 months ahead. He explaijned that the Credit Impulse indicator is finding new lows whcih does not bode well for global growth in world economies. This, according to Mr Jacobsen, is why investors and traders need one multi-asset access, and why global capital market access is very important and advanced functionality is required to be able to support analysis and execute in the right way.

From a positioning point of view, FinanceFeeds discussed the capitalization and commercials of the new SaxoTraderPRO platform with Saxo Bank’s senior management.

The new platform is positioned between some of the very advanced institutional-only platforms that currently exist and high-end retail trading environments.

This has been engineered into the platform so that advanced traders get some very good functionality, but also so that institutional clients get advanced fucntionality without the monthly fees such as per seat licensing that are often attached to purely instituional platforms, therefore all clients are able to use it. As of today, every Saxo Bank client can access the new SaxoTraderPRO platform by using their existing login and nobody is excluded but it really only benefits the advanced trader.

Thus, despite its fully democratic availability to all clients, SaxoTraderPRO remains the choice for advanced or professional and institutional traders, whereas SaxoTraderGO should be the choice for the larger market, and for traders that concentrate on one specific type of trading.

With the UK being an absolute and comprehensive environment for trading infrastructure, its entire domestic ecosystem being very much dominated by well established giants that have dedicated substantial resources to developing and providing their own platforms to which the domestic market client base is very much accustomed and loyal, SaxoTraderPRO was the result of substantial development and pre-launch testing.

The company’s senior executives today explained to FinanceFeeds that it was two years in developmnet, the brainchild of between 50 to 150 developers depending on its R&D lifecycle, was subject to user acceptance testing for 10 months with selected clients, and represents the largest platform investment ever made by Saxo Bank.

With the leverage levels being more aligned with many other regulated markets, Saxo Bank maintains that there will no longer be a competitor focus among participants, and that propositions will turn toward platform, price, service and product range, especially in the United Kingdom.

Next week, the platform will be launched in Hong Kong and Singapore, and indeed one of the recent commercial partnerships that Saxo Bank entered into is Valuable Capital Group which will be based on SaxoTraderPRO.

Indeed, FinTech is the core of this business, and the more the regulatory and customer engagement environment evolves, the more the world’s platforms will have to, with Saxo Bank’s ethos underlining the effort put into R&D is an effort that pays long term dividends.

Here is the new SaxoTraderPRO in action at its inaugural entrance to the institutional world.