Technology

MTS has successfully facilitated an orderly electronic European fixed income market for issuers, primary dealers and the secondary market since 1988. It is now used by over 1,200 market participants trading European government bonds, quasi-government bonds, corporate bonds, covered bonds and repo, with average transaction volumes of up to EUR 85 billion a day.

MTS takes its responsibility to this market very seriously and delivers continual technological innovation to support the diverse needs of fixed income market participants, along with proven system stability and local expert customer service.

Significant product development in cash and repo functionality, based on the needs of all market participants and drawing on 20 years of innovation and expertise, will continue to ensure MTS remains the electronic bond trading platform and fixed income market data provider of choice.

You can read an interview here with Fabrizio Cazzulini, CTO at MTS, on innovation and technology.

MTS delivers:

• Flexibility – one single trading platform combines different market models (B2B, B2C); products (cash, repo and swaps); and functionalities (click and trade, request for quote, etc).

• Scalability – modularity of components allows for both horizontal and vertical scalability.

• Capacity – level of throughput that MTS can sustain is continuously improving and is first class in the fixed income arena.

• Performance – average round-trip time of transactions is currently less than 1ms, with extremely low variance.

• Seamless integration – open architecture enables integration with ISV solutions and existing internal systems.

Connectivity

• MTS provides market participants with standard reference GUIs .

• Members can implement more sophisticated solutions (e.g. custom GUIs, auto-quoters applications) or integrate MTS trading functionality within their existing applications (e.g. deal-capture for risk management systems).

• The most effective and rapid way of communicating with the MTS markets is to use a native protocol called SDP. FIX protocol connectivity is also supported.

• The MTS markets platform can be accessed either via leased line connectivity or public internet.

• Official network service providers for leased line connectivity currently authorized by MTS are: BTRadianz, SIASSB, BItNet (LSE/Borsa Italiana Group) and UPC Czech Republic.

Straight Through Processing

• MTS is linked to all the major European clearing houses and central securities depositories (CSD), either domestic or international.

• Upon trade execution settlement instructions are automatically created and sent in real-time by MTS to the relevant central counterparties or CSDs/ICSDs on behalf of market participants.

• Copies for information messages can be sent to custodian banks and/or general clearing members for reconciliation purposes.

• The automatic creation of the instructions identical for both parties eliminates any risk of post-trade discrepancies and mismatching errors.