MarketAxess hires Dan Burke as Head of Emerging Markets

MarketAxess has appointed Dan Burke as Global Head of Emerging Markets, the operator of fixed-income trading platforms announced.

Based in London, Dan Burke will be responsible for the development and execution of business strategy for the EM business in both hard currency and local markets.

Dan Burke led Standard Chartered’s Electronic and Algo Trading

Reporting to MarketAxess chief executive Raj Paranandi, Burke will lead business and product management expansion of the company’s EM trading business across geographies and products.

Dan Burke joins MarketAxess after most recently serving as Managing Director at Standard Chartered in Singapore and London in his role as Global Head of Electronic and Algo Trading. At StanChart, he played a strategic role in the automation of the firm’s credit offering and entry into algorithmic market-making and portfolio trading.

Prior to that, Burke held several senior credit trading roles at Deutsche Bank in Singapore and Bank of America Merrill Lynch in Tokyo and Hong Kong.

Emerging Markets adopting e-trading of fixed income

Raj Paranandi, Chief Operating Officer, EMEA & APAC at MarketAxess, commented, “Dan brings a wealth of Emerging Markets experience and a valuable dealer perspective to MarketAxess at a time when adoption of and appetite for electronification of the asset class has grown significantly. There is still much more that MarketAxess can and will do to drive greater liquidity and efficiency for both investors and dealers internationally. I look forward to watching this area grow under Dan’s leadership.”

Dan Burke, Head of Emerging Markets at MarketAxess, said: “I’m delighted to be joining MarketAxess, a leading solution for Emerging Markets trading, and a platform that I have been a client of for over 20 years. MarketAxess is well positioned to accelerate the delivery of innovative solutions in Emerging Markets globally, and I look forward to partnering with all market participants to take our offering to the next level.”

The MarketAxess EM trading solution serves over 1,600 market participants in more than 120 countries, having reported record EM average daily volume of $3.6 billion, up 17.3%, in the first quarter of 2024. Latin America and Asia-Pacific clients generated record levels of average daily volume in the quarter, up 11.1% and 54.8%, respectively.

The company’s recent expansions include Open Trading for Emerging Markets local currency bonds, Request-for-Market to support larger EM trades, and new country-specific protocols like Casada in Brazil.

MarketAxess acquired Pragma and uses Adaptive Auto-X

Last year, MarketAxess acquired Pragma, a quantitative trading technology provider specializing in algorithmic and analytical services in equities, FX and fixed-income. Pragma offers independent, broker-neutral, multi-asset trading solutions to power asset managers, hedge funds, broker-dealers, banks, and exchanges around the world.

Its algorithmic trading platform and quantitative execution solutions provide equities and FX clients with automated, AI driven, multi-asset and multi market execution solutions.

Also in 2023, MarketAxess announced the first client algorithmic trade executed across multiple protocols in US credit using Adaptive Auto-X, its multi-protocol automated execution solution currently in pilot.

In 2020, Pragma introduced a deep neural network-based execution engine that controls the routing, sizing, pricing, and timing of orders, and has shown a robust improvement in execution quality.

Pragma’s algorithmic platform and technology team will help MarketAxess accelerate development of execution algorithms and data-driven analytics across all fixed-income products.