Trading platforms evolve for a cross-asset market

As trading desks become increasingly cross-asset, execution platforms are evolving beyond liquidity access towards consistent workflows, standardised protocols and end-to-end efficiency. Senior leaders across J.P. Morgan’s digital markets team explore this evolution, and where electronic trading is headed next

Electronic trading is now firmly established across capital markets, but the pace of electronification continues to vary. According to experts at J.P. Morgan, foreign exchange is around 95% electronically traded, while credit remains closer to 40%, reflecting the differing complexity, liquidity dynamics and execution requirements across asset classes.

Advances in artificial intelligence and large language models (LLMs) have helped firms unlock greater value from market data, creating opportunities to develop more differentiated products and enhance client engagement.

Together, the evolution is reshaping expectations of execution technology. Platforms are no longer judged solely on pricing or market access, but on how effectively they support traders operating across increasingly diverse markets. For clients, that evolution is often about reducing friction – fewer bespoke integrations, more consistent user journeys and tools that let execution teams act quickly with confidence.

Patrick Whelan, Richard Lascelles and Andrew Cole have been at the helm of this transition. They highlight how attention is now turning to more complex derivatives and digital assets as firms look to extend electronic workflows into new markets.

Redefining a converging buy side

Execution desks that once specialised by product are now consolidating into cross-asset teams, and that change is redefining what those desks expect from their dealers. “The evolution on the buy side continues unabated,” says Patrick Whelan, global head of fixed income digital markets at J.P. Morgan. “We’ve seen that, historically, there were more specialists on the trading and execution side from a buy-side perspective. That has evolved into more of a fixed income execution trading focus.”

Dealers, by contrast, have traditionally been organised around individual asset classes. As Whelan explains, business lines have typically operated in separate verticals covering credit, rates, FX and commodities. The focus now, he adds, is to identify “solutions and workflow efficiencies that we can bring from parts of FX, or from rates, that will potentially be scalable into these other asset classes”.

For cross-asset execution desks, having multiple dealers requires managing multiple technology integrations, with each new asset class requiring another bespoke application programming interface (API) connection.

“That menu was pretty much given to them as: here are 19 different APIs,” Whelan says. “That’s a lot of work for a buy-side desk to have to do in a very short period to code up.”

The alternative, as Whelan notes, was then to provide a common set of APIs for request-for-quote (RFQ) orders. “We’ll do the work behind the scenes to route it to the right places so that you get the liquidity you need.”

The goal isn’t more connectivity for its own sake – it is to make cross-asset execution feel more intuitive: one connection, familiar protocols and less operational overhead as desks expand into new products.

FX versus credit

Cross-asset execution is also undoubtedly reshaping client expectations, even though markets continue to progress through electronification at different rates. FX remains the most mature market, but its evolution has continued beyond simply increasing electronic volumes.

“There’s such a rich diversity of platforms that clients can trade on,” says Andrew Cole, chief product officer, Execute, J.P. Morgan Markets’ single-dealer platform.

“That encourages a uniquely competitive environment, and it means that, across the platform space and clients, there’s a constant dialogue of different ways of transacting.”

Credit, however, presents different challenges. Richard Lascelles, head of credit digital markets at J.P. Morgan, expects the market to continue evolving, but not to a fully electronic one: “I don’t think it is going to 100%. Generally, the portion of the market that’s not electronified is the block portion. It’s the larger trades.”

Market structure also influences the pace of adoption. While FX supports highly fragmented liquidity and sophisticated execution algorithms, credit remains more reliant on RFQ-based workflows and offers less price transparency.

Lascelles highlights the ongoing innovation aimed at reducing information leakage and giving market participants greater confidence that larger trades can be executed electronically without compromising price.

For Lascelles, better use of data is central to further progress. “Credit has been one of the last frontiers of electronification, largely because it is very unstructured in terms of the way the data is consumed and available within the market,” he says. “With LLMs, you now have the capability to take unstructured data and turn that into structured data.”

Overall, as demand grows for more data-driven execution and richer market intelligence, platforms are evolving beyond providing access to liquidity alone. Increasingly, clients are looking for intelligence that is embedded in the workflow – turning market data into signals they can use at the point of decision, not after the fact.

Platforms that can combine transparent pricing, deep liquidity access and real-time trade lifecycle management to support clients across asset classes are becoming even more indispensable.

Cross-asset consistency

As execution desks become increasingly cross-asset, efficiencies in one market often help accelerate change across others.

“I definitely think we like to see the cross-asset evolution because, typically, you have someone who has traded futures, equities and FX driving the decision-making as a desk becomes cross‑asset,” says Cole.

Cross-asset traders bring familiar capabilities, including algorithmic execution, streaming and common protocols, to markets in which those features are less developed, helping to accelerate electronification, Cole emphasises.

That evolution is also influencing how dealers develop technology. Capabilities proven in one market can increasingly be adapted across others, creating greater consistency while recognising the differences between products.

“These products are different, but the way you price them, the protocols used to execute them, they’re not so far apart,” Cole says. “We see the evolution of cross-asset desks as helping to standardise things in a way that makes things easier to design and build in a more scalable way.”

Lascelles sees the same pattern emerging in the securitised products group (SPG), where products are progressing towards electronification at different rates. “If you look across how a product electronifies, it typically starts to borrow things from pre‑electronified products and, in SPG, you are definitely starting to see that,” he says.

Derivatives as the next frontier

As electronic execution matures across liquid cash products, attention is shifting to more complex instruments such as derivatives. “I’m really excited about the evolution of derivatives as a way of getting clients onto the platform,” Cole says.

Derivatives typically involve additional structuring requirements, indicative pre-trade markets that must be firmed at the point of trade, and a long post-trade tail of unwinds, allocations and lifecycle events that have traditionally lived in the back office.

“Spot products and simple cash products have been easier to electronify. In the more structured space, client needs can vary significantly,” says Cole.

That is why the opportunity extends beyond execution into operations. “As we move more into the complex derivatives space, the workflow solutions that are needed for clients to be able to adopt a single-dealer platform become more important,” Whelan notes. “If you can solve those problems for the back office, you’re likely to attract more flow to the solutions that are able to provide that end-to-end efficiency to clients.”

For Lascelles, the same reasoning applies to any product that remains heavily over-the-counter, voice-traded or transacted through unstructured channels. “The appetite has come from clients wanting to trade the product more,” he says. “And you can’t handle that through scaling or through manual, non-electronic methods.”

Speed with guardrails

It goes without saying that AI is accelerating electronification in trade on many fronts, but particularly in structuring unstructured market data and shortening product development cycles.

In SPG, Lascelles points to bids wanted in competition (BWICs). “The scale of BWICs is growing enormously, but they are often sent with inconsistent formats and as unstructured data.

“One of the things we’re working on is the ability to create a general solution that can put BWICs in a structured format, and feed these to Execute for others to trade on.” The same techniques are already being applied in other markets, including repo.

AI is also changing how products are developed within financial institutions, allowing teams to prototype ideas and test concepts much more quickly, which places greater emphasis on governance.

“The key thing we’re focusing on is the guardrails you put around electronification,” says Cole. “Technology delivery is becoming less of a limiting factor in what you can do … we don’t want to be putting out products that are not standard and don’t have the right design.”

Lascelles warns that the speed gains from AI-assisted development come with a governance challenge. “With a single prompt, AI can now accelerate the generation of significant amounts of code … This makes it critical to ensure appropriate review, testing and control remain embedded throughout the development lifecycle.”

Convergence and future intelligence

Electronic trading is no longer defined simply by how much activity moves from voice to screen.

As buy-side execution desks continue to converge, the value shifts to platforms that allow traders to move between markets without friction across common workflows, interoperable connectivity and the discipline to reapply what has already worked elsewhere, while preserving what makes each asset class distinct.

“The extent to which a product starts to standardise and begins to electronically trade only makes it more eligible to join that cross-asset desk,” Lascelles notes.

Platforms that combine transparent pricing, diverse liquidity access and streamlined workflows will drive the next wave of electronification and institutional trading.

スポンサーコンテンツ