When selecting a new trading platform, we believe it is useful to recognize which trends affect your organization. More clearly understanding the impact these trends can have on your system requirements can help you make the best choice for your business:
 

• Market Consolidation – In recent years the financial market has seen an increased tendency towards mergers amongst financial players. In a bid to remain competitive and increase trading volumes, consolidation has enabled organizations to more quickly enter new markets, expand their client base and offer new products and services.
  
  In practice, mergers require companies to integrate diverse operational processes, infrastructure and data. The more an organization grows through acquisition, the more complex this typically becomes.
  
  To facilitate a smooth transition, an organization’s underlying systems must be flexible enough to interface with multiple and varied software products, and easily cope with modifications to workflow, processing cycles, tasks and user groups.
   
• Globalization – The internet has brought the world closer together. Operating in new markets and emerging economies requires organizations to offer localized service, and handle geographically and culturally diverse staff and business practices.
  
  An organization’s systems must seamlessly scale to handle growing transaction volumes and new users in various locations around the world. They need to support users speaking different languages, with different information needs and data display requirements.
   
• Increased Competition – At the same time that the market is consolidating, new and non-traditional players are emerging. Increased competition has put profit margins under pressure, forcing organizations to cut operating costs in order to remain competitive.
  
  Traders are being asked to provide more sophisticated service, diversify their expertise and trade multiple products.
  
  Old, inflexible technology is simply too expensive to maintain and modify to suit today’s business needs, and does not adequately support the new demands placed on traders. Financial services organizations need systems that can help improve operating efficiencies and lower costs on an ongoing basis. They need to provide information in a way that supports a trader’s new role and his changing information requirements. In short, as an organization’s business requirements evolve, its underlying infrastructure cannot be a limiting factor – it must also cost effectively evolve as needed.
   
• Greater Transparency – Following several high-profile corporate fraud cases, organizations now face stricter regulatory requirements and increased demand for transparency from shareholders and other stakeholders.
  
  To comply with regulations and appease stakeholders, organizations are looking to reduce risk: risk from human error and risk from inadequate or poorly adhered to processes.
  
  It is essential that systems enforce stricter workflow compliance, automate both transaction flow and static data requirements, and increase the percentage of Straight through Processing (STP) transactions – without compromising flexibility and configurability.
  

TwoFour has been designed and built to address the specific business challenges faced by organizations today, and to be flexible enough to cope with future industry dynamics. TwoFour:
 

• Integrates seamlessly and cost effectively with other, diverse (legacy) systems.
• Scales for additional users around the world and increased transaction volumes.
• Is flexible enough to cope with evolving operational practices through its easily configurable workflow engine.
• Enables traders to view consolidated information across all products in a single blotter or trade settlement screen, helping them make better decisions faster.
• Allows traders to easily add proprietary calculations and different rate and yield curves as needed, and to group and view data in an infinite number of ways to meet changing requirements.
• Reduces human error through automated and configurable workflows, structurally increasing the percentage of STP transactions, and supporting centralized static data storage and retrieval.
• Allows global users 24x7 trading with no down-time or end-of-day processing stoppage.
  

Find out more about TwoFour.