Virtu Financial went home with the best equities E/OMS award at the European Market’s Choice Awards this year. Michael Loggia, global head of workflow technology at Virtu Financial, discusses the company’s recent successes and future plans.
What has driven your success this year?
When I look at the organisation’s recent success, I can’t help but attribute it to the culmination of a multiyear, technology-driven strategy that is now coming to fruition. The acquisition of ITG by Virtu marked a shift in our long-term product vision, which drove a full-scale migration of our entire client base over the past five years and laid the groundwork for the current version of our execution management system (EMS), Triton Valor. The backbone of Triton Valor is a truly global, data-driven EMS built with an asset class-agnostic framework. The tireless efforts of our product, sales, and coverage teams, along with close client partnerships, have propelled our highly regarded standing in the marketplace.
How have you focused investment to support this growth?
Creating a system with the ability to operate across asset classes was the first step in our growth plan. Once we had a solid foundation for Triton Valor, we were able to focus our product and development resources on building out feature sets to address our clients’ largest challenges. For our client community, the issues that tend to be in focus centre around automation, expansion of functionality within non-equity assets, and leveraging data to help guide client trading decisions. Each of these items represents functionality that clients are eager to leverage, and from which they see direct benefits.
Immediate client adoption also has the added benefit of creating a productive feedback loop, allowing our team to iterate in response to a constantly evolving marketplace. Integration with our top-tier in-house analytics product, Virtu Analytics, is an example of where this integration shines. We can present broker-dealer scorecards based on losing quotes from RFQs as well as AXES and IOIs. The native integration with Virtu Analytics allows us to easily present these valuable pre-trade insights with a simple blotter click. Additionally, custom broker scores can be pulled directly from our analytics environment to drive further trading automation. The combination of our Virtu Analytics product, when paired with the EMS, creates a very powerful offering that is only available from Virtu.
What has been customer response?
The client response to our long-term product strategy and recent releases has been overwhelmingly positive. This has been evidenced both in many unsolicited industry publications citing our usage rankings (such as Bloomberg’s articles on EMS and Algo wheel market share), client-based surveys (e.g. The Trade’s Annual EMS survey, where we were the top-scoring EMS based on client feedback for four consecutive years), and anecdotally by our client-facing team. Importantly, our investments have driven growth across many client partnerships, providing us with greater insight into their long-term strategies and opportunities to collaborate. Keeping a pulse on how our clients see the future is paramount to our ongoing success and we rely on their insight to shape our project roadmap and guide technical investments. One of our most important measures of success as an organisation is client satisfaction, and I’m proud to say it’s among the highest levels it has ever been during my tenure at Virtu.
In which areas are you building the team (numbers/skills etc), and why?
As markets have continued to evolve, we’ve seen a shift in the mix of skill sets we’re looking to employ. In general, our dedicated coverage personnel have migrated to more technology-centric roles. Five years ago, our regional coverage desks might have been a mix of 80% soft skills and 20% technical skills. Our current staffing has become much more technically savvy while retaining a baseline of other skills, allowing them to successfully educate, troubleshoot, and guide clients daily. The technical skills enable greater utilisation of existing toolsets, such as user-facing APIs, which allow our team to build and maintain customised solutions for clients faster than ever before. All that said, we also pride ourselves on having a team of individuals with practical trading knowledge. We’re very proud of the culture we’ve fostered and the team we have in place.
How will the market see your offering evolve over the next twelve months?
At Virtu, we are never finished improving. Maintaining a top-tier product requires continuous investment and evolution. We are developing platforms that support many of the largest global trading desks and we must continue delivering for them so they can achieve their own growth targets. Our plans for this year and next will include a mix of the items mentioned above as well as expanding access to new venues and asset types that were previously unavailable. Our goal is to minimise friction in the entire trading process while maintaining an intuitive, centralised dashboard for each trader, allowing them to accomplish everything they need within our user interface. We have clearly heard our clients’ feedback: no one wants to login to fourteen separate systems and constantly switch between them just to execute a single trade. We are more focused than ever on enhancing our capabilities and strengthening partnerships where appropriate to provide a best-in-class experience for all our clients’ needs.
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