Raymond James Uses Rapid Addition for TRACE reporting
August 30, 2011
A London-based trading technology software firm said that brokerage Raymond James installed its software to send details on asset- and mortgage-backed securities transactions to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority’s Trade Compliance and Reporting Engine.
Rapid Addition said its RA-ShortCut FIX adapter will allow Raymond James to send and receive messages in the Financial Information Exchange (FIX) protocol and to transform them between other protocols such as the International Organization for Standardization or ISO used on the SWIFT network; XML and SQL.
Rapid Addition’s FIX adapter connects to Raymond James’s BizTalk middleware which accesses the necessary information from Bond Desk and reformats it into the FIX protocol required by the TRACE system for asset and mortgage-backed securities. The brokerage firm will migrate reporting its trades in corporate bonds now done by Bond Desk through Rapid Addition's FIX adapter when FINRA adapts the FIX protocol for corporate bonds.
“Rapid Addition’s FIX adapter provides Raymond James with the compatibility and integration necessary to quickly comply with the new regulatory mandate to TRACE to report on mortgage- and asset-backed securities,” says Danny Quattlebaum, roadmap manager at Raymond James in St. Petersburg, Fla. “In addition, the flexibility of Rapid Addition allows the firm to use a proven platform for future FIX and TRACE initiatives."
Had Rapid Addition not been selected, Raymond James would have needed to build the link to the TRACE platform for asset and mortgage-backed bonds itself -- a far costlier and time-consuming process, says Quattlebaum. There were no other FIX engines which could immediately integrate with Raymond James's BizTalk middleware.
The agreement with Raymond James is Rapid Addition’s first involving reporting to the TRACE system and marks another major contract for the UK firm after it nabbed a deal in July to provide technology to Johnson Investment Counsel, a wealth management firm. Last year, Rapid Addition also won a mandate to provide part of the technology for Mercado Intergado Latino Americano (Mila), the new Latin American stock exchange.
“The complexities of cross-border, multi-counterparty transactional products and the processing environment, very often composed of numerous legacy systems, can make the costs of achieving process automation prohibitive,” says Ross Lucas, head of sales at Rapid Addition. “The flexibility of our offering enables it to be used anywhere in the business process.”
The goal of the TRACE platform, launched in July 2002 is to help FINRA detect fraud, market manipulation and other illegal activity in the U.S debt market with the exception of Treasuries and other money-market instruments. TRACE provides details on trades in corporate bonds, such as the most active bonds, volume, advances, declines and new highs and lows and was expanded in May for asset and mortgage-backed securities.
