“We are moving to the next chapters of the electronification story.”
The electronification of the U.S. credit market is not only gathering momentum but also moving to the next phase with automated and systematic trading, according to Mike Sobel, Co-CEO & President and Jason Quinn, Chief Product Officer and Global Head of Sales, Trumid. The electronic trading platform has played a key role in driving the rise of fixed-income e-trading. At their New York office, they spoke to Kevin McPartland, Crisil Coalition Greenwich Head of Research for Market Structure & Technology.
Volume in the U.S. credit market has surged almost 60% over the past four years with a corresponding increase in e-trading to nearly half the market from less than a third.
“We feel that the momentum can continue,” stated Sobel, pointing out that there’s currently as much enthusiasm for “not just e-trading but market structure, technology and new ways of doing things” as at any point in the 10 years of Trumid’s existence.
“There's a virtuous cycle between the use of technology, availability of data, e-trading, automation solutions, and not just market volumes but liquidity. More liquidity and better transparency and efficiency lead to higher participation. Liquidity begets liquidity. … While we think the electronification story is still a big one, we're moving to the next chapters of that story, which are things like [trade] automation and systematic trading,” he added.
Fixed-income participants continuously seek innovation in trading mechanisms and protocols. Yet not all of Trumid’s new ideas to solve age-old problems gain immediate traction. One such idea surprised Quinn on the upside at a recent Fixed Income Leaders Summit (FILS) with its major theme of dealer-to-client (D2C) non-competitive trading.
Recounted Quinn, “Listening to it, I was like, ‘Geez, we’ve had this Attributed Trading workflow for years.’ Over the first few years, while we were establishing the infrastructure and getting dealers connected for it, I got frustrated with how serious the market was in taking that traditional OTC flow into a more electronic solution. But as soon as you're ready to say, ‘Hey, guess we got that one wrong,’ we're at FILS six years later, and it's a major theme. So, it feels like maybe, we skated to where the puck was going.”
A bilateral D2C protocol that mimics the OTC workflow, Attributed Trading crossed $3 trillion in total traded volumes in Q2 of 2025. So, how does it work?
“If you're on the sell side,” explained Quinn, “you tend to put the sign outside the building that you're open for business as you send your market data to clients. Historically, that has been done in an unstructured format, where clients consume those runs and then either pick up the phone or send an IB (Instant Bloomberg message) when they want to trade. Attributed was built to be a structured version of that, starting with the distribution of market data and addressing dealer concerns of total control over where the data is going and the ability to subscribe clients based on their streams.”
The protocol also supports “full-blown tiering,” where dealers can send different prices in different sizes to various groups of clients. Plus, it supports portfolio trading (PT) re-offers, which have picked up with the growth in PT. “We included newer tools for the buy side because we have thousands of axes streaming across Attributed. That's a firehose of information, so [we make sure] the buy side can discover what's most relevant to them,” elaborated Quinn.
The protocol is getting “fantastic uptake” from the sell and buy sides, according to Sobel: “We're proud that this offering we've built over years turns out to be just the right thing as the market evolves. … When you innovate and collaborate with clients, you want the applications and use cases to evolve and expand.”
Meanwhile, in another evolution, fixed-income e-trading is getting automated. According to Quinn, the existing automation is primarily in the “hit-lift decision within an RFQ,” which is “a great starting point.” In another starting point, Trumid has deployed automation within its Swarms workflow, “so that orders can be automatically created” based on a user’s criteria.
“But what we really want to do is have automation move higher up. … Imagine a world where you could tell a system, ‘I'm a buyer or seller of these things. This is how long I want you to work it, these are my limits, and these are the sizes.’ And you believe the system has vibrant liquidity and workflows, and that it can go out and smartly get you executed,” stated Quinn.
It will take some work to prove “the machine is doing a really good job with that execution,” but Quinn is excited about the prospects.
Looking ahead, Quinn stated: “I think the market is at a really interesting point. What's going to happen over the next three to five years will surprise some people, and it's going to come in the form of the automation story. … It's exciting to me because I think the market structure is about to evolve a lot more.”
Added Sobel, “Introducing new ways to make decisions and handing the keys over is a delicate process. But recognizing that, given data, technology can reach conclusions and act as a co-pilot to humans in traditional decision-making, and action-taking is consistent with the vision we have for the partnership between Trumid, as both a technology provider and an execution venue, and our clients.”
“We want to be the absolute best technology company in the space. And we’re leveraging AI and machine learning not just to build intelligent workflows, but to make the development process itself crisper and more efficient, using these capabilities to help write code and accelerate innovation," elaborated Quinn.