Horizon targets Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam

Electronic trading solutions provider Horizon Software is targeting its growth efforts on Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam, its head of sales for the Asia Pacific region has said.

While Hong Kong and Singapore remain a major centre for the Paris-based fintech firm, the less mature markets in the region’s Southeast are a focus, said Emmanuel Faure, who joined in in January last year after several years spent in brokerage at Fimat/Newedge HSBC and Jefferies.

“Horizon historically has been very active in Asia,” Faure told Global Investor. “Over 60% of the results of Horizon in the world are done in Asia Pacific. Over the last few years we’ve done a big push in Southeast Asia because the markets were developing, and that’s why it’s more visible that we’re pushing forward in Malaysia, Vietnam and Thailand.

“These smaller new markets are growing at a very good pace and we see new players from China, Hong Kong and Korea. As the markets are a little less mature, you have more opportunities in arbitrage.”

According to Faure, Horizon’s development in Vietnam began as a progression from the firm’s strong presence in Thailand and its work with the Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange to support the launch of covered warrants.

“We have currently around five clients doing market making in Vietnam on warrants and ETFs (exchange traded funds),” Faure said. “It was a logical and natural move to go to Vietnam, the markets are very similar in terms of activity.”

Due to the pandemic, Horizon is currently expanding through recruitment rather than adding more physical offices to its locations in Bangkok, Hong Kong and Shanghai. Since Faure took up his post, Horizon has expanded its APAC workforce by over a third, adding four staff in Thailand and four in Hong Kong, increasing the team to around 30.

The onboarding of new talent reflects Horizon’s strategy to develop its order management and algorithmic trading systems as it expands beyond its historical derivatives prop trading solution to tap into the agency business, which is growing much faster than pure market making, Faure said.

As an example, one of the five market making clients in Vietnam is also an agency business using Horizon’s OMS system.

While Horizon continues to improve its “plug and play” prop trading platform, including a significant investment in co-location and hosting, OMS and algo trading are a big part of the company’s roadmap for 2021, Faure said.

”We want to be a leading solution vendor for both agency and prop trading. We are the only platform which is built on the requirements of proprietary trading firms and offers the same capabilities to the agency business, so it’s kind of unique.”

Horizon won the Multi-Asset Trading System of the Year award in the recent FOW International awards.

The firm integrated its algorithmic trading platform with Wolverine Execution Services (WEX) late in 2019, enabling its clients to connect to the WEX infrastructure to manage orders on US options, futures and cash equities.