Electronic trading support product of the year: TransFICC

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Key points Summary

• Fragmentation in fixed income and derivatives markets poses challenges for banks and asset managers as they manage connections to around 200 trading venues globally.
• TransFICC’s One API simplifies access to multiple trading venues, allowing clients to connect in minutes, rather than months.
• The platform, designed for low-latency performance, has expanded to support 93 workflows and is connected to 86 venues, enhancing client access to the fixed income market.
• Recent investments and client partnerships, including Citadel Securities and Wells Fargo, support TransFICC’s growth and development of new services such as automated RFQ handling.

These summaries are generated by an LLM, but edited by humans.

Fragmentation remains one of the primary challenges in fixed income and derivatives markets. Approximately 200 venues operate worldwide, each with its own application programming interface (API) and workflow. For banks and asset managers, maintaining these connections has become increasingly demanding as electronic trading volumes rise and regulatory requirements tighten. During the market volatility of early 2025, TransFICC’s systems continued to operate normally even as prices on some venues updated more than 6,000 times a second – a test that underscored the need for scalable, resilient trading infrastructure.

Steve Toland, TransFICC

TransFICC’s core service – One API – provides a single connection point that simplifies access to trading venues and data. Instead of building and maintaining separate links for each venue, clients connect once to TransFICC. The software translates multiple-venue APIs into a single standardised format, reducing the need for bespoke coding and ongoing maintenance. For many firms, connecting to dozens of venues can take months of engineering work per venue, but with TransFICC’s API, those links can be established in minutes. “Every venue and workflow is slightly different, and that’s what our technology is built to handle,” says Steve Toland, co-founder of TransFICC.

Speed and reliability are critical in today’s fixed income markets, where prices on some venues can change thousands of times per second. TransFICC’s platform is designed for low-latency performance, using open-source technologies such as Aeron and Simple Binary Encoding protocols to process large volumes of data quickly and accurately. It timestamps orders and prices to the microsecond, giving clients an audit trail that supports best execution. The platform handled recent volatility without any drop in performance.

Over the past year, TransFICC has expanded the scope of its services. One API now supports 93 distinct trading and post-trade workflows, covering products from interest rate swaps (IRS) to municipal bonds. A new Financial Information eXchange multiplexer enables clients to migrate to TransFICC while keeping their legacy systems in place. “We’re now connected to 86 venues,” says Toland. “That gives clients immediate access to the whole fixed income market – for data, trading and post-trade – without the burden of building and maintaining those links themselves.”

The company has also grown its infrastructure. Its data centre point of presence network now includes London, New York, Chicago, Frankfurt, Tokyo and Hong Kong, with new locations in Bergamo (Italy), Singapore and Aurora (Illinois) due to go live later this year. TransFICC manages the facilities directly rather than outsourcing them.

Clients that run systems in the cloud can connect directly to TransFICC’s network through local Amazon Web Services data centres, while others continue to use co-location for the lowest possible latency. Toland notes that co-location is about more than just speed. “People assume it’s all about latency, but compliance is just as important,” he says. “Clients need to prove they have robust systems in place. We give them high availability, with multiple switches and servers and no single point of failure.”

Another major development is TransFICC’s e-trading service for credit and IRS. It was built in response to client demand for more efficient handling of requests for quotes (RFQs). The service combines a desktop interface with automated pricing and negotiation tools. The TransACT feature automatically manages smaller RFQs, freeing traders to focus on more complex trades. Integrations with Algorithmica and Quinsol extend these tools to smaller firms without in-house pricing systems. “Many dealers receive more than 40,000 RFQs a day,” Toland explains. “TransACT lets them handle that flow automatically, so they can trade more without adding headcount.”

TransFICC’s growth has been reinforced by new clients and investment. Citadel Securities became a partner in 2025, using TransFICC for connectivity within its liquidity outsourcing service. One API was adopted by Wells Fargo for government bond, credit, municipal bond, mortgage and loan trading, and National Australia Bank for government bond and swaps trading. A $25 million series-B funding round led by Citadel Securities and BlackFin Tech is supporting further expansion. The company has increased headcount by around 20% to build out connectivity and new workflows.

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The firm’s software development process is central to how it delivers updates and responds to clients. TransFICC follows an agile approach based on Extreme Programming and continuous delivery, allowing it to release new code weekly to production and daily to test environments. Developers work in pairs to review each other’s code, while automated tests run continuously to detect and fix issues early.

Looking ahead, Toland says one of the biggest shifts on the horizon is the rise of “trading as a service”, or outsourced liquidity provision. “It’s been common in foreign exchange for years, but it’s now starting to gain real traction in fixed income,” he says. “We’re working with Citadel Securities on this – TransFICC is providing all the connectivity and automating workflows for government bonds, credit and IRS.”

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