Traders Magazine spoke with Tom Whelan, Global Head of Instinet Technology Solutions at Instinet, which won Best Equities Trading Platform at the 2023 Markets Choice Awards.

What did Instinet’s win for Best Equities Trading Platform mean to your firm?

We’re very honored that Instinet was selected for Best Equities Trading Platform at this year’s ceremony. I’m personally quite proud to be part of a team that shows such a tremendous degree of commitment, to our business and to our clients. It’s always gratifying when our client focus, and innovations are recognized, but most of all, we’re grateful to our clients for trusting us to be a crucial part of their workflow each day. We congratulate all of this year’s award nominees and recipients on their achievements.

How does your trading platform differentiate in a competitive landscape?

A main differentiator is that as an agency broker, we don’t trade our own book, so all of our capabilities are provided for the exclusive benefit of our clients. We’re also very thoughtful in curating our access to internal and external liquidity. Every area of Instinet keeps focused on relentlessly improving efficiency and performance across our solution set. And, by providing human insight and expertise alongside our advanced technology, we push performance and execution quality to new levels for clients.

Uniquely, Newport® also supports our own high-volume agency business, globally, and each version is used by our own internal trading desk, before we deploy it to clients. This provides us with invaluable feedback during the test process so that we can optimize the product for clients prior to release.

How do you enhance the user experience for clients?

Instinet’s platform is continually developed and supported by an experienced team that understands client workflow needs and the trading environment. Our client support and product development teams are dedicated to delivering seamless client experiences and can help dig into the extensive capabilities we have available. We work very closely with clients to provide tailored workflows and our tools are highly configurable.

Because data increasingly drives how traders approach execution strategies, we’ve embedded our rich analytics offerings into Newport, though they are also offered as standalone platforms. One of the biggest challenges our clients face is “overload” – too much data noise, yet not enough actionable information. And, because intuitive visualizations are essential for quickly interpreting the surges of information, we’ve invested heavily in this space. We’re constantly look for ways to improve our clients’ efficiency and performance, pushing our infrastructures and tools toward new levels of insight. For example, as we develop models and signals internally for our algorithmic trading, we’re providing the outputs on our Analytics front end, for human or systematic consumption.