Santander taps Horizon for market making on Polish “consent-free” equity market

Global Connect is a new equity market where global stocks are listed by introducing Market Makers without the issuer’s consent.

Introduced by the Warsaw Stock Exchange (WSE), the new equity market aims to make stocks listed on global securities exchanges tradable in Warsaw, during local reading hours.

Santander is the first liquidity provider to participate in this new market and Horizon’s market-making systems have been deployed on the WSE to cover many asset classes, including equities, equity futures, and index futures.

The relationship between Santander Bank Polska Group and Horizon dates back to July 2019 when it tapped the fintech firm to enable market making in equities and derivatives on the WSE as part of its strategy to expand and upgrade its services.

Horizon also provides Santander with the tools & technology for both quoting and hedging. These solutions ensure efficient access to the market and allow clients to obtain an accurate monitoring of positions.

Introducing new technological standards to the Polish capital market

Daniel Posyniak, Deputy Director at Santander Brokerage House, said: “We are delighted to share information about our advanced trading solution developed in collaboration with Horizon Software. This is an important element of our wide-ranging plans, under which we want to introduce new technological standards to the Polish capital market. Thanks to Horizon, we are in an even better position to achieve the goal of improving the quality of services offered to our existing customers and increasing market share by proposing new products to market participants. The time has come for new technologies to set the rhythm of change”.

Alexandre Chriqui, Head of Client Success at Horizon Software, added: “Thanks to the existing Horizon Market Making platform, participation into the new Global Connect market was possible for Santander without any additional development on the Front Office side. Existing platform composed of Market Data handlers, Pricing and Quoting automatons, WSE Market Gateway and Position Management modules were fully leveraged for a seamless integration of Global Connect. I am proud to write that Santander IT and Trading staff are fully proficient with our platform and they were able to run this project with a high degree of autonomy”.

Horizon’s Market Making caters to banks, and institutional and retail brokers

Horizon provides direct connectivity to more than 80 exchanges worldwide and allows clients to quickly create, test and implement automated trading strategies in real-time.

It was in 2021 that Horizon expanded its Electronic Trading platform to include market making and agency trading functions. Offered in one single platform powered by Horizon’s algo framework, the firm’s Market Making and Algo Trading services leverage its expertise in latency, scalability and expertise in algo and execution strategies to banks and brokers.

The market making and agency trading solution features advanced functionalities in high touch, DMA, DSA and global order routing for equity and global derivatives. This will enable banks and institutional and retail brokers to meet the trading challenges of today and tomorrow.

Horizon stated that clients using their Market Making solution are now expanding towards client order flow and execution through one single platform, optimizing their running cost and implementing cross businesses logic such as Internalization or Central Risk Book.

Horizon’s Managed Services and Hosting is a complementary service that turns the solution into a one-stop shop and takes ownership of upgrades, monitoring, configuration, and full users support.