Agility. Collaboration. Interoperability. Speed.
Those are some core components of an increasingly must-have feature on institutional trading desks: custom trading workflows.
Anvar Karimson, Kepler Chevreaux
Monolithic trading systems had their day in the sun when electronic trading rose to prevalence in the 1990s and 2000s. But that legacy technology wasn’t designed for today’s complex and rapidly evolving markets, in which resource-constrained institutional traders need flexibility and choice in the form of differentiated workflows, quick implementation of new functionality and trading strategies, and bespoke workflow configuration.
“Now more than ever, clients are looking for help in customizing what they want to express,” said Anvar Karimson, Chief Technology Officer at Kepler Cheuvreux. “That’s where standard workflows fall apart a bit, because the world changes faster than it used to, and client expectations are higher than ever. Agility needs to be a cornerstone” of trading-technology suites.
“Trading firms are looking to create a flexible, underlying platform that can support bespoke workflows and easily connect to any third-party or in-house applications, rather than relying more on traditional off-the-shelf type solutions,” said Mike Powell, CEO of Rapid Addition, a provider of trading platform technology. “The idea is that this gives you much more choice in the technologies and applications you can deploy, while enabling you to more quickly respond to client needs or market structure changes.”
Workflow efficiency was the third most-predicted daily trading challenge for this year, behind only volatile markets and liquidity availability, according to JP Morgan’s 2025 e-Trading Edit, which surveyed more than 4,200 institutional traders. The 15% of traders who cited workflow as the top challenge increased from 13% in 2024 and 9% in 2023.
Mike Green, BMO Capital Markets
By way of background, Michael Green, Managing Director, COO EMEA Electronic Trading at BMO Capital Markets, noted that the concept of custom trading workflows has been around for a long time. What’s new is that the electronification of markets and the sophistication of workflows have raised the bar on the technological architecture needed to efficiently support custom trading workflows.
“By ‘efficiently’, I’m talking about turning around requests from clients very quickly, and building a series of custom workflows for many individual users, while keeping the whole thing under control,” Green said.
One major sticking point with technology built 20 years or 30 years decades ago – some of which is still in use on some trading desks today – is that it wasn’t designed to be customized, and therefore customization is costly and inefficient.
Controlled Adaptation
Green highlighted the graphical user interfaces (GUI) as a key differentiator of modern technology. “A GUI allows you to go onto a platform and adapt,” he said. “Adapt which venues you trade on. Adapt the urgency by which you trade. Adapt in terms of the different types of stock that you trade in different ways. Adapt in applying different sizes to different orders, depending on market volumes.”
“Modern, advanced technology allows you to do all of the above, and do it in a controlled way, meaning you won’t break anything,” Green added.
Mike Powell, Rapid Addition
Powell of Rapid Addition noted that trading technology is more open than it used to be, it’s more driven by application programming interfaces (APIs), and it can be deployed on the premises or in the cloud. “You have more choice in how you deploy, and the technology is built with more of an open-API mindset,” Powell said. “This makes sunsetting legacy applications from your ecosystem and integrating new ones a lot easier than it used to be.”
API integration, which connects different software applications to enable data exchange and automation, was projected as the most influential technology for trading over the next three years by 15% of institutional traders in the JP Morgan e-Trading Edit, second only to artificial intelligence / machine learning.
Mike Maloney, Proposition Director for Buy-Side Trading at LSEG and CEO and Managing Principal at LSEG’s REDI EMS, noted a distinction between customizable and configurable. Customization, which is de rigueur for execution management systems, can deliver what a trading team wants, but it can take a long time to build and deploy. A configurable system can slot into the team’s workflow and be in place essentially overnight. “It’s about meeting the end user where they are,” he said.
Mike Maloney, LSEG
“A bespoke solution that meets every single need can be a tremendous advantage – the disadvantage is time to market, because the more truly customized something is, the longer it’s going to take,” Maloney said. “There’s a fine line between, do I want to customize everything down to the colors and the position of static data on the screen, or do I want a solution that meets my needs and can be configured in a flexible way so I can be fast to market?”
For trading and investing firms that are on a path to modernizing legacy technology, the optimal way forward involves leveraging the advantages of customization while leaning into the benefits of configurability.
“If you can get the fundamentals right – the underlying technology, the stability of your platform, the stability and resiliency of your FIX network – you can get to the next-gen technology that allows you to build on top of that in a scalable and modular way,” Maloney said. “That’s what will allow you to grow into the future.”
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