BBVA, the Madrid and Bilbao-based financial services group, has partnered with Wematch.live to fully automate its Total Return Swaps (TRS) infrastructure.
The BBVA equity finance desk has been working with Wematch.live to automate its solutions as part of the firm’s equities product expansion and investment in technology.
Initially, both firms developed automatic booking of basket TRS trades from Wematch into BBVA's Murex, as well as the automatic update in Murex of any new composition of basket TRS, after a reshuffle calculated and agreed through Wematch.live.
Following this milestone, BBVA implemented the Sales to Trader Workflow (STW) tool for basket and single stock TRS using Wematch.live capabilities.
This tool is designed to enable BBVA to follow any trade from inception until expiry and keep all the interactions between sales, traders and counterparts.
According to BBVA, the firm has managed to achieve “a degree of full automation” of the whole TRS lifecycle by automatically sending the equity cash orders of new basket TRS, rebalances and unwinds to the liquidity providers and brokers.
By feeding these executions automatically into Murex, BBVA explains, this reduces the risk of input errors and improves the pace and accuracy of trade booking.
Commenting on the new development, Nicolas Allano, BBVA global head of equities, says: “These achievements are extremely relevant for the equity finance desk as they increase the digitalisation of a substantial stake of its daily activity and remarkable improvements in terms of efficiency, productivity and scalability.
“These projects are a clear example of BBVA’s efforts to strategically transform the equity business using technology, with a clear focus on the manufacturing of investment products.”
