Insight

A Deep Dive into Equilend Competitive Bid

Mike Norwood

May 2023

Mike Norwood, Head of Equilend Trading Solutions, dives into the key functionality, interconnectivity and enhancements on the horizon for Equilend Competitive Bid, a new hybrid screen and messaging-based NGT workflow built for trading in the hard-to-borrow marketplace. 

What key functionality does Competitive Bid offer?

Competitive Bid gives market participants the ability to centralize fragmented workflows by pulling deal names into a purpose-built UI to evaluate bid/offer levels, market data and their existing book of business in a single screen. It allows users to:

• Visualize supply/demand at the security level
• Compare industry levels to those shown to you
• Negotiate on screen – accept/reject/counteroffer
• Leverage existing technology pipelines to automate the portion of your book that requires handholding by agreeing terms online and using traditional order initiate and shared trade ticket protocols

What are the core benefits of Competitive Bid?

With features like real-time data and depth of market, this powerful tool allows traders to view and agree the core specials they want to trade across multiple counterparts, ensuring users have more control during agreement while maintaining certain currently automated processes. Among others, the primary benefits include:

• Centralization – View multiple lists in a single place rather than dispersed across chats
• Automation – No need for re-key
• Reduced Risk – Eliminates operational risk inherent in manual hand-keyed trades, which is better for CSDR
• Market transparency
• Streamlined execution record keeping important for timely settlement under T+1

How is Competitive Bid interconnected with other solutions across the Equilend ecosystem?

Competitive Bid represents the first platform leveraging information from Equilend Data & Analytics Solutions in concert with Post-Trade Solutions contract data to enhance trading workflow and decision making.

By leveraging existing post-trade data, users will see their outstanding quantity and weighted-average fee for competitive securities by counterpart. Furthermore, traders will see real-time transaction data from Equilend Real-Time Data, which itself leverages both post-trade and trading information to calculate prints. Security-level information is additionally piped in directly from DataLend.

What enhancements are on your roadmap for Competitive Bid?

Competitive Bid is designed to provide users with the opportunity to easily automate bookings for trades that are difficult to automate – deal names, volatile names, etc. As such, we’ll continue to enhance the powerful tool based on feedback from our clients to add relevant data and workflow tools while bringing automation to the rest of their book. Additional upcoming enhancements include corporate action-specific fields for guaranteed cash election/undecided, as well as support for cents per share bids. Stay tuned, as there is lots more to come from Equilend Competitive Bid!