Resolving the trading symbology conundrum

In today’s ever-expanding and evolving global financial markets infrastructure - more assets, venues, platforms, vendors and counterparties - banks and financial institutions want:

• Efficient engagement with multiple clients, platforms and markets

• Greater interoperability between myriad internal and external trading components and technologies

• Enhanced programme trading, risk management and regulatory reporting processing capabilities

• Effective, consistent enterprise solution to manage multi-source, multi-product trade data

These requirements and challenges rely heavily on the timely delivery of good quality data.

Industry challenge: symbology standardisation

Within the derivatives trading environment, using and applying quality reference data is a critical driver of change in terms of greater interoperability (between multiple moving parts) and efficient trade processing and reporting.

High-quality, fit-for-purpose data, formatted specifically to ‘fit’ these many and varied trading components and process applications is imperative for more efficient trading workflows, supporting operational efficiency (and lower cost of trading).

The challenge, particularly for sell-side banks and financial institutions, is that no standardised symbology exists to describe tradeable instruments. Indeed, different symbols are often used to identify the same instrument, depending upon the originating exchange, trading platform and/or data vendor. These identifiers are typically dynamic and change frequently. The advent of new exchanges and instruments only adds to symbology complexity.

Introducing symbology – FOW's Seamless cross-vendor symbol mapping

Symbology is an entirely independent, exchange, vendor and trading platform-agnostic, symbol mapping solution that allows client orders to be mapped instantly into clearing, settlement, portfolio management and regulatory reporting systems.

Our unique, cross-vendor, instrument identifier symbol-mapping also supports seamless client onboarding, regardless of the different technologies each employs to manage market data, order execution and trade management.

Symbology’s established and proven service provides instant access to a trusted, fully symbol-mapped, ‘golden source’ master file containing all requisite industry, front office, middle office, back office, market data, post-trade and regulatory reporting identifiers for exchange traded derivatives and OTC futures and options instruments.

Most important for firms seeking trading operations efficiencies, users have absolute flexibility and control in terms of the range of data retrieved, and frequency of access, to the Symbology platform. Our “Data as a Service” pricing model means you pay according to the amount of data consumed (and frequency of access).

This offers a considerable cost and time advantage over solutions that require fixed subscription to an entire set of industry data to filter out the specific data you need.

The Benefits to you

The right data, in the right format, how and when you want it

• Customisable, asset-focused Symbology data feeds allow orders from bank clients’ trading platforms to be streamed instantly to clearing and settlement systems.

• Using the same symbology, clients’ open positions can be tracked dynamically by retrieving real-time prices from market data connections and also support enhanced, data-rich client reporting.

• Users have absolute flexibility and control in terms of the range of data retrieved, and frequency of access, to the Symbology platform. Our “Data as a Service” pricing model means you pay according to the amount of data consumed (and frequency of access).

• This offers a considerable cost and time advantage over solutions requiring a fixed subscription to an entire set of industry data to filter out the specific data you need.

Support for all trading participants

• Symbology’s translations enable sell-side firms to onboard clients seamlessly for efficient trading, risk management and clearing and settlement services, regardless of clients’ own market data, order execution and portfolio management technologies.

• Buy-side clients benefit from receipt of accurate trade data from, and access to more products from the comprehensive and growing number of Symbology-partnered trading venues and data sources.

• Data providers (exchanges, data vendors etc.) gain a competitive edge in terms of new business opportunities from timely, efficient product switching. Symbology’s enterprise solution facilitates seamless ‘product passporting’ between different platforms (e.g. Bloomberg and Refinitiv).

FOW's Symbology service supports all market participants – and the industry as a whole – by reducing exception reporting and improving risk management.

Symbology - the industry-leading service

Symbology is the industry-leading smart data feed of exchange traded and OTC traded futures and options instrument data, enriched with root/trade series level symbols, mapped to key market data and back-office vendor identifiers.

Working with industry-wide clients and partners since 2005, we refine and enhance our carefully curated symbology solution and continue to deliver flexibility, and choice (and a competitive edge) in the services banks offer to the buy-side community.

FOW is an independent, industry-neutral business. This gives us an advantage in securing cross-industry, multi-party support for the symbol mapping solution.

Contact us to find out how we can lower your costs, but still give you data sets you need, when you need it and how you need it.