Speaking in conversation with a Troy Dixon, co-head of global markets at Tradeweb at the Fixed Income Leaders’ Summit USA 2026, Jenny Xiao, global head of rates trading at BlackRock, who also oversees the company’s global systematic trading function, pushed back firmly on a thesis gaining traction in parts of the market that electronification has run its course.
“That seems totally false,” she said. “Anyone who says that just has no concept of what’s going on in the market and what’s still available to people.”
She outlined two distinct dimensions to the opportunity. On automation, she argued the industry had barely scratched the surface of what was achievable even in already-electronified products.
“You can do bigger sizes, you can do a variety of workflows, you can expand from a simple decision tree of; voice, request for quote and auto execution into a much more dynamic methodology that incorporates algorithms, that incorporates portfolio trades (PTs) and incorporates all kinds of different execution methodologies. It doesn’t have to be so simplistic.”
On electronification itself, she pointed to the rapid growth of total return swaps as evidence that instruments were now entering the electronic ecosystem from a standing start.
“There’s an increased utilisation of total return swaps (TRS) industry-wide, whether it’s government bonds, single-name sub-TRS, index TRS, or bespoke QIS-type stuff. All of that is growing as an overall product that is being used in the marketplace that’s not electronified at all today.”
Swaptions, she said, are her personal priority. Having begun her career booking swaption tickets by hand at Barclays, she described how even the sell side was now deploying AI to remove manual effort from the inquiry process.
“There are some banks now that I know have an AI transcriber that will take my trade and automatically feed it into their pricing, no one has to type it in. So there’s a lot of evolution in the electronification of the entire lifecycle of more complex derivatives trades that still is quite available to us.”
The scale imperative at BlackRock underpins all of this change. Xiao noted that the firm’s trading operation had processed more than 25 million individual trades – a figure up 50% from five years ago – while the team size has remained broadly flat. Assets under management have grown from the $5 trillion cited at a 2019 industry conference to $14 trillion today.
“We have no choice [but to scale],” she said. “The tax on the system every day is just growing, so there’s no other option.
“The launch of swaps auto-execution, developed in partnership with Tradeweb, was held up as the clearest recent example of that imperative translating into structural change. Within six months of going live, more than 10% of BlackRock’s swap trade tickets were being auto-executed — with zero-touch the near-term destination.
“I think that’s a transformative change in the derivatives marketplace,” Xiao said.
Dixon, speaking from the Tradeweb side of the partnership, described a parallel effort to improve the quality of data underpinning automated execution decisions. He outlined a recent tie-up with a predictive markets provider as part of a wider push to move beyond purely TRACE-based inputs.
“Predictive data seems to be much greater and more accurate than the polling we had seen in certain areas before, and we’re adding it into our already large aggregated data sets that we use to do execution-solution-based execution,” he said.
The goal was not to remove humans from the process but to give strong traders greater reach.
“If you have a star trader or idea generator, they have greater surface to execute and optimise,” he said.
But Xiao sounded a note of caution about what could be lost in the rush to automate. Recalling the atmosphere of an earlier generation of trading desks — where traders would stand up and debate what Fannie Mae paper was doing or what the Fed might do the next day — she expressed concern that data abundance could erode the market instinct that makes a trader genuinely valuable.
“I really want the trader of the future to not lose that passion for markets, because we’ve empowered them with so much data that they don’t need to think anymore — that’s a big concern of mine.”
Her closing message to the room was, “Challenge every preconceived notion that you have of what is possible. Every person has a lot more ability to make change and impact within a firm, within their life cycle of trading, within the industry, than you ever would have thought before.”
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