GLMX – Best Global Technology Provider

Andrew Turvey, GLMX’s Director of EMEA Sales, explains to Global Investor the company’s prominence as a leading provider of electronic securities finance trading technology, offering insights into GLMX’s background and expertise in the field.

This article is part of the 2023 Autumn Magazine, which can be accessed here.  

For the third consecutive year, GLMX is honored to receive the award for Best Global Technology Provider in ISF’s annual client-driven survey of Securities Borrowing and Lending Technology. GLMX, the global leader in dealer-to-client (D2C) electronic securities finance trading technology, swept this year’s awards in its category.

For the first time, in addition to winning the Americas and the EMEA categories as it has in previous years, GLMX entered and won the APAC category. This complete sweep of each region voted on by an array of GLMX clients who actively use its technology – resulted in GLMX receiving near perfect “7” scores in all components of the unweighted categories.

GLMX’s core mission has long been to build comprehensively capable electronic trading technology for the global money markets. No surprise, then, that these “Global Liquid Markets” made their way into the company’s name, with an added “X” to reflect the interconnectedness of this massive ecosystem.

Since its inception nearly fourteen years ago, the firm’s mission has been to build a single technology solution to seamlessly link the highly fragmented money markets. GLMX is delivering on this objective and is living up to its name.

Mirroring those global ambitions, GLMX is now active in the Americas, EMEA and APAC. Given increased activity in the Japanese and Australian government bond markets this year, and the enhanced functionality the platform provides to aid the funding activities undertaken by our sell- and buy-side subscribers for these products, GLMX has now taken the top spot in APAC.

GLMX has been servicing both the Americas and EMEA successfully for many years and is proud that global market leaders in each of these regions are vocal advocates of our technology, which has proven to enhance complex interactions with their trading partners.

Users achieve immediate operational benefits by pivoting away from anachronistic, analog, operationally intensive daily workflows, which can feel more like survival than success, empowering them to thrive and to focus on growing their franchises. Underlying GLMX technology has become the unifying factor in delivering this connectivity - whether an APAC user transacting in local Credit collateral, or a GSIB managing US Treasuries.

At the end of the day, access to Liquidity is the universal objective of participants in the global money market. GLMX technology is specifically designed to maximise access to these fragmented liquidity pools. We count over 40, highestquality liquidity providers as clients.

As such, GLMX delivers access to geographically disparate, deep and diverse liquidity pools. With a total of over 115 of the world’s largest financial institutions, transacting over $600 billion (£494 billion) in new transactions daily, GLMX can lay claim to proving the deepest single source of liquidity within the D2C securities financing space.

This will grow, with the number of new sell-side firms expected to reach 50 by year end. We also continue to see impressive demand from the buy-side, across every type of institution: asset managers, pension funds, money market funds, insurance companies, hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, corporate treasurers, municipalities and securities lenders.

The global money market relies upon a massive network-effect – overlapping clients accessing fragmented liquidity pools results in maximal overall liquidity for the system. After decades of phone, messaging and email providing that network effect and after many years of underinvestment in fixed income technology – driven in no small measure by persistent nearzero global interest rates – finally capable technology has coalesced with favorable market conditions to push the global money market past the tipping point of digitalisation.

The momentum for the adoption of modern technology continues to build and is likely to persist for many years as the global money markets have significant ground to make up as relates to the use of trading technology in other major financial markets. A virtuous cycle of growth has been established, where skeptics have become converts and converts have become evangelists: it’s apparent that engaging in securities finance transactions through a digital platform empowers both sides of the trade, by eliminating the “toil”, and allowing market professionals to focus on the real value-add within their specific roles. Conversely, legacy protocols look increasingly archaic, increasingly manual, and increasingly frictional relative to those in the digital GLMX network.

Market consensus has confirmed that we have well and truly passed the inflexion point where negotiation, execution, and trade processing via electronic platforms, initially considered as “ nice to have ‘’have now indubitably become“ impossible to live without.’’ The growth of the GLMX network, driven by the need for the transactional efficiency which our technology delivers, leads to access to a much deeper aggregate pool of liquidity, all with increased efficiency and transparency.

While GLMX has long been recognised as an innovator in Repo trading technology, our core journey is not finished. For roughly a decade, the firm has been building technology and developing an ecosystem to support its growth. As balances on the platform have continued to grow, we have worked tirelessly to expand available functionality in order to better service the entire mosaic of repo activity. This intentional move beyond “vanilla” flows, encompassing every kind of term structure, across the broadest range of collateral, for every type of client, has set GLMX apart.

Developing beyond what many thought advisable or even possible, GLMX is now positioned to leverage its flexible technology into other front-end markets. Each segment of the global money market has its own idiosyncrasies, but our extensive work within perhaps the most complicated segment ensures that our ability to innovate will extend seamlessly across other portions of the global money market.

In fact, GLMX has been building quietly for these critical and adjacent market segments for several years. We now have a full suite of securities lending functionality that is actively being used by some of the industry’s largest securities lenders.

We have engaged pilots for Time Deposit (TD) and Certificates of Deposit (CD). On top of those, GLMX is currently developing trading functionality for both Commercial Paper and Total Return Swaps. With this expansion into new market segments, GLMX continues to execute on its vision of building the single access point for money market trading.

As GLMX methodically and systematically pursues its ambition to become a single access point for all segments of the global money market, its technology increasingly delivers value as a nexus of liquidity for its clients. The value of its network is further strengthened through the integration we have successfully delivered with over 20 third party OMS/EMS providers that service our clients, as well as with a large number of our clients’ proprietary trading systems via industry standard and bespoke API connections.

Also, integration with industry utilities, such as Triparty agents and Central Clearing counterparties (CCPs), provide more industry interoperability which reduces input errors and speeds up trade information flow. By creating an environment where trade information can flow freely, quickly and accurately, the market benefits from a faster and more accurate settlement process.

Finally, should any of the many promising potential DLT solutions become reality in the near future, GLMX will be prepared to seamlessly extend its connectivity to them. In sum, GLMX efficiently provides for the three basic needs of any marketplace - digital or otherwise: ease, convenience and choice. Clients convene wherever they can accomplish their primary business objective. This behavior is heightened when that primary objective is critical and urgent. Access to liquidity IS an existential need.

GLMX continues to weave itself into the fabric of the global money market in order to execute its mission to serve the existential need for liquidity access across that entire, massive, systemically critical ecosystem.