Liquidnet Further Enhances Trading Platform With Acquisition of OTAS Technologies

Addition of trader analytics accelerates firm’s Virtual High Touch™ offering while also delivering MiFID II solutions tailored for the buy side

NEW YORK / LONDON, May 17, 2017 – Liquidnet, the global institutional trading network, today announced its acquisition of OTAS Technologies–a market-leading analytics platform that delivers actionable market intelligence and context directly to institutional traders and portfolio managers. OTAS’s industry-leading analytics and market insight, combined with Liquidnet’s Virtual High Touch decision-support trading platform, will help enhance the buy-side trader’s decision making process and give the trader more control over achieving best execution.

“The biggest challenges we hear from our buy-side Members today center on two things – finding the liquidity they need, and being able to sort through vast amounts of market information to access what’s relevant,” said Rob Laible, Liquidnet’s Global Head of Equity Strategy. “Our goal with this acquisition is to bring OTAS’s analytics into the Liquidnet platform and deliver market context directly to the trader at the point of execution.”

“The need to fill this void in the trader’s toolkit is further underscored by the added best execution requirements under MiFID II,” Laible continued. “We believe that a firm that incorporates OTAS analytics and our VHT platform into their trading strategy will be able to show a process and commitment to consistently achieving best execution for each and every order.”

The institutional trading landscape is changing rapidly as new regulations have firmly shifted responsibility for achieving and justifying best execution to the buy side. This can be a complicated process due to differing and changing market structures around the world, real-time market dynamics, market fragmentation, and varying liquidity profiles.

To help traders successfully manage this new landscape, Liquidnet launched Virtual High Touch (VHT) in November 2016–a completely new category of trader intelligence and decision-support tools for institutional traders that combines advanced data analytics, unique liquidity search tools, advanced algorithms, and real-time decision support. The idea behind VHT is that technology–when delivered in a meaningful, insightful and actionable way–can truly make the difference in terms of capturing and delivering alpha.

“Asset managers need a global partner that understands the complexities of market structure, compliance, and liquidity, and can bring to bear the tools and technology that are most relevant and impactful for the buy-side trader,” commented Tom Doris, Founder and CEO of OTAS Technologies. “By joining with Liquidnet, we are helping clients achieve their performance objective by delivering a more complete trader intelligence platform that can help address all parts of the trading process: finding liquidity; measuring potential trade impact; monitoring marketing conditions; and now supporting a best execution strategy on an order-by-order level.”

Launched in 2011, OTAS Technologies has established itself as a market leader in providing next-generation analytics and trader intelligence. More than 60 financial institutions currently access OTAS’s platform either directly or via one of its several channel partners, which include several OMS and EMS providers.

SenaHill Partners acted as the exclusive strategic and financial adviser for OTAS. SenaHill is a merchant bank focused on the financial technology (FinTech) sector.