Case study
A US Investment Bank · eFX & Equities Algorithmic Trading
At a glance
The engagement
A US investment bank engaged Capmark to enhance its electronic trading estate across FX and equities. The eFX business ran on Integral, a third-party vendor platform; equities ran on an internally built algorithmic trading platform. The work spanned front-office enhancement, risk engineering into the US book, the middle-office system clearing and settling trades through its Calypso integration, updates to order management systems including OPICS and Fenics, and the hosting, cloud and system-integration foundations the estate ran on.
The challenge
Pricing and execution on the Integral eFX platform had fallen behind what clients and liquidity providers expected, the internal equities algorithmic platform needed new execution capability and tighter controls, and risk written in regional books needed to move to the US book systematically rather than by manual rebooking. Downstream, the middle-office system clearing and settling trades through Calypso, and the OPICS and Fenics order management systems, all had to keep pace with the front-office change. The estate also rested on hosting and point-to-point integration that had to be modernised and cloud-hosted to carry the new volumes reliably, without becoming the next constraint.
Our approach
We delivered the enhancements front to back: pricing and execution at the front, risk transfer in the middle, clearing and settlement behind.
01
Enhanced the vendor eFX platform: liquidity-provider onboarding and connectivity, client pricing tiers, spread and skew management, pre-trade price-tolerance and credit checks, and richer request-for-stream and streaming workflows, lifting fill rates and pricing competitiveness.
02
Extended the internal equities algorithmic trading platform with new execution strategies (VWAP, TWAP, POV and implementation shortfall), smart order routing across lit and dark venues, and strengthened RTS 6 pre-trade risk controls — price collars, order and message-rate limits and kill functionality — with TCA to evidence execution quality.
03
Delivered FIX connectivity and venue and liquidity-provider onboarding and certification, and stood up the algo testing and release controls the platforms needed: conformance and market-replay testing, clock synchronisation and event timestamping (RTS 25), and version-controlled release governance signed off across front office, technology and risk.
04
Engineered automated back-to-back trades into the US book so that risk executed in regional books transferred systematically: booking model, trade enrichment and lifecycle events handled without manual intervention.
05
Enhanced the middle-office system that clears and settles trades through its Calypso integration: confirmation matching, settlement processing and reconciliation, lifting straight-through processing rates.
06
Updated the OPICS and Fenics order management systems for the new flows: trade capture, pricing data and downstream feeds aligned to the enhanced front office.
07
Engineered the hosting and infrastructure foundations the enhanced platforms ran on — environment build-out, low-latency hosting and cloud landing zones — and the system integration wiring the eFX and equities front office into the Calypso middle office and the OPICS and Fenics OMS estate, so the new flows ran on stable, supportable infrastructure end to end.
The outcome
The eFX and equities platforms now price and execute to the standard the business needed, risk moves to the US book through engineered back-to-back trades rather than manual rebooking, and the Calypso-integrated middle office and updated OMS estate clear and settle the new flows straight through — on modernised hosting and cloud infrastructure with the systems integrated front to back.
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