SunGard Launches Brass Liquidity Services for Equities Trading

SunGard’s Brass Liquidity Services, a suite of market access solutions for both buy- and sell-side institutions, was launched today. SunGard’s Brass Liquidity Services helps firms improve execution quality, minimize information leakage and decrease total overall execution costs. Integrated with SunGard’s order and execution management solutions, as well as the SunGard Transaction Network (STN), Brass Liquidity Services includes Brass Sponsored Access, Brass Smart Order Routing, Brass Dark Pool Aggregator, and Algorithms.

Increased regulation and changes in market structure have caused liquidity to migrate to dark venues, introduced latency to the trade lifecycle, and significantly increased total execution costs. Brass Liquidity Services provides integrated solutions from a single vendor to help buy-side and sell-side institutions explore new revenue opportunities, enhance execution quality and capabilities, and reduce access and clearing costs associated with participating in a deeply fragmented marketplace. Brass Liquidity Services is provided via Assent LLC, a registered broker-dealer. Additionally, the services will be available to the 1,900 asset managers and 250 broker-dealers currently connected to STN for trade automation and execution services.

SunGard’s Brass Liquidity Services includes:
• Brass Sponsored Access: Brass Sponsored Access provides customers direct connectivity to protected venues, helping them leverage Assent’s memberships to reach their intended destination. Direct connectivity through Brass Sponsored Access helps customers realize potential cost savings versus membership fees at each venue, as well as decrease both regulatory and reporting obligations associated with exchange memberships. Additionally, Brass’ high-speed, low-latency connectivity helps customers reduce the number of hops it takes to reach the best-priced markets. By minimizing the number of hops, latency in the trade lifecycle is reduced, thus helping customers mitigate their risk against missing a price point. Currently, thirteen firms are using SunGard’s Brass Sponsored Access to access protected venues directly.

• Brass Smart Order Routing: SunGard’s customizable suite of smart order routing strategies helps automate the decision process. They also enhance execution quality by helping customers execute order flow at the best possible available price across displayed and non-displayed venues. Customers using Brass Smart Order Routing can integrate Brass strategies into their existing trading technology, to help decrease latency and maximize overall execution quality.

• Brass Dark Pool Aggregator: The Dark Pool Aggregator is an intuitive dark aggregation engine that offers a single point of access to reach strategically targeted dark venues. Employing intelligent routing functionality, the Dark Pool Aggregator concurrently sweeps dark venues for fill opportunities before routing out to displayed market centers. Concurrent sweeping helps customers benefit from reduced latency and information leakage, while helping them to capitalize on non-displayed crossing opportunities and maximize overall execution quality. Consolidated access to multiple pools also helps customers streamline their processes by maintaining a single vendor relationship, rather than maintaining separate agreements with various venues. Furthermore, the Dark Pool Aggregator integrates with SunGard’s trading technology solutions, STN’s order execution services and existing systems. This integration helps improve implementation, reduce time-to-market and improve usage of existing strategies to access dark markets.

• Algorithms: Developed by quantitative specialists, Brass Liquidity Services offers a series of algorithmic strategies to help reduce market impact and optimize overall execution capabilities. These algorithms provide traders and portfolio managers with comprehensive historical statistics and real-time monitoring of market conditions to help them make smarter decisions and capitalize on available liquidity. Each algorithmic strategy aims to help minimize execution costs by trading in small increments over time. Additionally, customers can access intelligent post-trade analysis. These strategies are accessible from SunGard’s trading technology solutions as well as other vendor solutions.

“The introduction of SunGard’s Brass Liquidity Services builds on our strategy to support our customers’ changing needs across the entire trade lifecycle,” said Raj Mahajan, president of SunGard’s trading business. “SunGard offers a comprehensive suite of mission-critical products and services that can help provide both buy- and sell-side institutions with complete solutions – from pre-trade analytics to liquidity management to clearing and compliance – helping them maximize profitability, reduce costs and ensure compliance.”