All the banks that demonstrated ETD sites this year were justifiably proud of what they had, and all were confident that their sites served clients’ needs well.
But Lehman Brothers managed to differentiate itself from an extremely close field because its SmartConnect system is more flexible and better designed than any other bank’s. It can be customized extensively, and enables users to choose from many different ways to trade. It is well designed and clear to use and it makes it easier than any other system to trade complex strategies across several markets.
Guy Britton, global co-head of listed derivatives at Lehman Brothers, says: “Our key objective is to provide clients with a state-of-the-art platform combining speed, security, user-friendliness and a high degree of functionality. Added to this is our commitment to provide users of SmartConnect with an ever-widening range of exchange connectivity and as resilient and reliable a platform as possible, supported round the clock by a dedicated team of sales and technology specialists.”
The system has all the features that users expect as standard, such as depth of market, trade blotter, contract sorting and filtering, one-click trading, flexible execution and the ability to create inactive orders in preparation for an announcement. But it also has some extremely advanced functionality that enables users to trade complex strategies easier than any other system.
The Multiple Exchange Legger is a particularly impressive component of the trading system that enables users to easily construct synthetic strategies with any number of legs. It can be left alone to execute these strategies – spreads, straddles, butterflies, or whatever else the user can think up – and will wait for the right opportunity and begin to execute, using artificial intelligence to minimize the possibility of a trade leg failing.
The system offers connections to 11 electronic exchanges, as well as order routing to open-outcry pits for execution by Lehman traders.
