cross-asset “Liquid Trading Desk”
are suitable for automatic routing
to brokers with either zero or very
low touch, using what Kumare-
san calls a proprietary systematic
model that plugs directly into its
FlexTrade execution management
system. This frees up the high
touch trading teams to add value
on demanding orders.
The asset manager also has spe-
cific teams dealing with high touch
trading where specialist knowledge
26 // TheTrade // Spring 2018
and human involvement can be
required. But, even here, traders
are given tools in line with the
technology-driven focus of the
company.
Fixed income traders, for ex-
ample, use tools that aggregate
real-time and historic market
data sets to assist with price and
liquidity discovery. In equities, the
company is developing a model to
price liquidity in very large orders
to help traders with large blocks.
Technology de jour
Artificial intelligence (AI) is cur-
rently the technology de jour for
the majority on the buy-side and
Nordea is no exception. The firm
currently uses AI within its pre-
trade workflow automation pro-
cesses to detect erroneous data and
ensure data integrity, particularly
useful with these types of problems
as AI can capture far more obscure
data errors that occur in the pre-
trade process.