Close teamwork is seamlessly delivering sophisticated services to the users of J.P. Morgan’s Execute platform.
J.P. Morgan’s Execute platform has 4,000 users globally, and facilitates billions of dollars in transactions every day, across FX, commodities, rates, credit, and it is now enabling structured products and more esoteric product offerings to trade.
The engine room of the product is the FX franchise which has thousands of users, but key to its success has been the expansion of new products and asset classes in order to deliver real value to J.P. Morgan’s clients.
Andrew Cole, Execute product manager at J.P. Morgan, says, “The thing I’m most proud of is figuring out the different ways to making a business grow on the platform. If you take something like commodities where we have a huge range of different products and a massive range of different workflows, we’ve had to figure out how to scale technology to be very flexible. For example, commodities tickets on the platform cover milk, metals, gold, everything in between. So, building tickets and infrastructure that supports such complexity, and variation is hard and is ultimately what’s enabled us to scale that business. For something like FX options, where there is a significant amount of complexity to the tickets themselves, scaling that is also a challenge.”
A starting point is to take the broad range of asset classes that are being covered and identify commonalities in the different user journeys, and then finding ways to scale and abstract some of those pathways that users are taking, so that something you build in FX can scale into rates and credit.
The technical aspects of this are one challenge, but just as important are the insights into client workflows which allow the team to ensure that Execute is a value-add to users when they trade.
“On the distribution side, it’s not always easy to convince clients to consider trading in a particular way or on a particular platform,” he says. “As well as figuring out a technique for providing technology solutions that allow very flexible tickets and very flexible workflows, you also have to figure out a fairly flexible way to appeal to different client segments and to distribute your product.”
This reflects the multi-role platform which Execute delivers to very different user bases. It is a single bank platform providing execution to sales, internal trading, and directly to clients.
“The ways in which we do that are really different depending on the client segment you’re going after or the product you’re trying to bring them onto,” he adds.
Individual users have individual ways of working which, while rarely unique, can be different enough that customisation of processes is necessary, with the capacity to customise dependent on the development team and the insights they receive from their own users and clients.
“One of the ways that we attract users is through offering those custom solutions,” Cole says. “A lot of the customisation that we do is in the backend, and a lot of the success of the platform is through working tightly with the design team to figure out how a user can feel that the journey they’re on is customised to them but doesn’t actually involve doing things very differently.”
Patrick Whelan, global head of FICC digital markets, says, “These solutions are developed by a small number of people, and obviously it’s strong collaboration between our technology teams, our product team, our design teams, and everybody else in between to help develop these solutions.”
From a user perspective, customisation is frequently directed at reducing friction without reducing capability, to support greater ease of use. To achieve this, J.P. Morgan’s design function and user research function work closely to ensure that they can scale the tools being developed, using A/B testing across users and user groups to maximise effectiveness and minimise disruption.
Data provides traders with the guidance to find the best execution for an order, and analytics deliver that information visually to those decision makers. Many data sets have common components between asset classes, and creating a set for clients that has quickly recognisable aspects allows that common interface to maximise ease of use, quickly visualise some of the trends that are being represented.
Whelan says, “During the volatility of Liberation Day and the subsequent days afterwards, we saw our clients embrace analytics, especially around those periods. Obviously, we had record volumes as well. Watching the platform stand up to the heaviest barrage of clients, users, and volumes traded was great to see. Equally, it was great seeing users embracing services we had developed knowing that what matters in real time is different to what you want to look at over a time series on a historical basis.”
Rapid deployment of data via a single-dealer platform is highly effective, but Execute also provides connectivity via an application programming interface (API) to clients that want to aggregate the information directly in their own execution/order management systems (E/OMS).
“The common componentry behind the scenes make it easier for us to stream that market data to give them the relevant analytics differentiated where and as they need it at the point of trade,” explains Whelan.
Considering the evolution of the single bank platform, Execute fits into modern e-trading infrastructure today, and through expansion into more complex product sets it will support the continued growth of e-trading across assets.
“Looking forward, I see two areas of opportunity. The first is streaming click-to-trade in as many markets as possible. We are now offering an increasingly wide range of products on Execute – this year alone, we’ve added credit bonds and ETFs, to name a few. The second area is the growth of more complicated products. There’s significant potential here because clients value the ability to input complex products accurately and efficiently more than anything else when it comes to execution,” says Cole. “When we look at the electronification of FX options, we see that in the third-generation exotics the percentage traded electronically is far higher for the most complex products because clients like the comfort that they get from entering it themselves, seeing the parameters that they want to select, and not going through in a chat and explaining in great detail how that product needs to be structured for them.”
List products and derivatives traders for any asset class will soon see a new range of tools coming in from the technology team at J.P. Morgan that will make scaling and distributing those products simpler, supporting the demand from clients to get their hands on a solution that allows them to communicate accurately.
“The future for us is a derivatives-led offering that will definitely resonate with our user base,” says Cole. “We think that as the product complexity increases, the risk increases. We’ve seen recently with some of the technology vendors in this space that they struggle to manage the product complexity well. They struggle to synergise the different ways in which different banks have managed to communicate and distribute these products. This is our platform, we have the ability to flexibly add the fields to customise the ticket to your requirements. That gives us an edge, and we believe that as electronification moves from the simpler to the more complex products, that edge will do us well.”
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