We firmly believe that Straight Through Processing (STP) starts in the front office. At Varden we have been working with our clients to maximize the leverage they can obtain from their Trade Order Management system via ECN automation.  Our team has extensive experience working with many of the leading products and vendors including: Charles River, Macgregor, Landmark, FIX, ITG Platform, Liquidnet, FXConnect, TradeWeb, CTI, and Plexus.

Order Management & Compliance Implementation

A Global Investment Manager with $80 billion in assets under management selected Varden to provide the technical implementation expertise necessary to consolidate the firms geographically distributed equity and fixed-income trading environments.  The following services wereprovided during the various phases of the project:

• Product Training and Workflow Analysis - Worked with end-users and analysts to determine optimal workflow and necessary configuration to support the client's diverse trading needs.
• Interface development - Provided analysis and development of all inbound and outbound connectivity to portfolio accounting systems, custodians, and additional downstream systems. Additional interfaces have been developed to provide integration between the firm's Employee trade tracking and Trader Performance monitoring systems.
• System Configuration, Tuning, and Disaster Recovery - Provided Sybase database monitoring and optimization and Citrix configuration to support 100 users in a WAN environment.
• Compliance Setup and Training - Taught compliance and systems personnel how to configure, operate, and diagnose compliance in both a pre-trade and post-trade environment.

ECN Integration

Varden is a pioneer in bringing ECN integration to Equity, Fixed Income, and Foreign Exchange trading desks.  Developing Database, API, or FIX interfaces, we have developed solutions that allow several of the industry's leading ECNs to communicate with various order management systems.  The net result of this integration is that it allows Traders to electronically route and execute trades to a particular broker/ECN without manual phone calls or human intervention.  Traders can concentrate on working large orders and supporting portfolio managers and eliminate dual entry associated with non-integrated systems.  Samples of ECNs integrated are:

• TradeWeb – Having implemented the TradeWeb STP solution, traders can now originate trades in the TradeWeb Viewer and automatically have executed and allocated trades flow into the Order Management System.
  
• LiquidNet – Providing a constant flow of equity orders to the OMS, the interface allows Liquidnet to continually monitor large block trades that are eligible for execution with corresponding Institutional Managers. The process has been developed to support Sybase, Oracle, or MS SQL Server implementations.
  
• FX Connect – Utilizing the FX Connect API, Varden developed a bi-directional interface allowing foreign exchange desks to execute spot transactions in order to cover currency needs resulting from foreign trades.

Web Extensions to Industry leading Trading Platform

The fixed income trading desk for a large global manager required the ability to apply a proprietary benchmarking function for each trade processed in their industry standard trading system.  To facilitate this required functionality, Varden developed a web-based application that seamlessly integrated with the OMS blotter such that the user could navigate directly from a particular trade to the benchmarking application.  This environment provided the firm with an ideal compromise between developing an in-house system and outsourcing the application completely. In this environment, the workflow of the manager dictated that system’s approach instead of the application dictating the workflow.  Since development of the initial application, additional features have been added to provide customized web reporting and streamlined compliance features specific to that firm’s unique needs.