As other providers of transaction cost analysis (TCA) exit the space, Trading Technologies is taking a different path by doubling down on innovation and expanding its technology platform.
Founded on a vision to modernize trading infrastructure, TT launched the first hybrid cloud-based trading and analytics platform in 2014. Today, TT’s platform serves top global banks with integrated trading, surveillance, order management, and algo tools. Soon to be backed by a recently announced strategic partnership with Thoma Bravo, TT is accelerating technology investments to lead capital markets innovation.
Traders Magazine caught up with Peter Weiler, EVP and Managing Director of Data and Analytics at Trading Technologies, to discuss current trends in the TCA space and how the firm is positioning itself for the future.
What major trends are you seeing shape the future of TCA, and how is TT evolving its TCA offering to stay ahead?
Many of today’s trends align closely with our existing roadmap, with initiatives already implemented, underway, or coming soon. The biggest trend is a shift toward multi-asset capabilities, alongside a growing focus on opaque asset classes like private credit.
Another key theme is artificial intelligence. We’re on the leading edge of AI for TCA. For example, we’re pioneering chatbots that answer complex trading queries—beyond static manuals—enabling instant, automated reporting that replaces tedious manual processes.
This means traders will be able to quickly get answers to questions about trading volume, costs, expensive trades, or broker usage—tasks that typically require time-consuming monthly or quarterly reports.
Beyond automation, we offer a comprehensive, multi-asset trading view that captures the unique nuances of each market. This transparency, especially in traditionally opaque areas, started with equities, is advancing rapidly in fixed income, and continues to improve as price discovery grows—enabling deeper, data-driven insights.
Can you walk us through the core differentiators of TT’s TCA solution compared to legacy providers?
We’ve been pioneers in this space from the start. For example, we co-created VWAP, or Volume-Weighted Average Price trading indicator, which is now standard across the industry, and built the first PC-based TCA platform around 2000—transforming what had been a paper-heavy process. Since then, we’ve continued to lead through partnerships with major institutions like Fidelity, J.P. Morgan Asset Management, and most otherlarge, prestigious global asset management companies co-developing tools and frameworks that are now industry norms.
More recently, we’ve been focused on bringing transparency to private credit, working with top-tier firms to apply advanced analytics to a space that historically had almost none. It’s a trillion-dollar market today and could be north of $10 trillion in the next decade.
What sets us apart is that trade analytics is a core business, not a side offering. Unlike firms where TCA is just an add-on, this is what we do—deeply, consistently, and with purpose. And as the space evolves, we expect others to step back, while we continue to lead.
What specific challenges do firms typically face during TCA transitions, and how does TT simplify or de-risk that migration process?
When it comes to onboarding, one of the most important things, especially now with a competitor exiting the space, is the ability to bring clients on quickly and efficiently. We’ve built the technology to do exactly that. We already have established integrations with all the major OEMSs, so when a client sends us a dataset, we can often run it as soon as the next day, and have them onboarded within a week if necessary.
What typically slows things down isn’t the tech—it’s alignment on how the client thinks about their workflow. For instance, something as simple as “what is an order?” can vary. If two portfolio managers buy the same stock an hour apart—is that considered one order or two? That definition matters for how we recreate workflows and run accurate analysis.
To streamline this, we’ve built a proprietary implementation portal that gives us flexibility. It’s a major differentiator—especially compared to competitors who can take months to onboard clients. We’ve never received two identical data specs, but we’ve designed our system to handle a wide range of formats. Of course, there are essential fields—like executing broker, trade date, time, symbol, and side—but beyond that, we can work with what’s available and still deliver robust analysis.
How does TT’s TCA platform leverage real-time analytics, and why is that becoming increasingly important in today’s trading environment?
We have five other lines of business, and we operate as a platform company—that’s central to how we think about growth and integration. The goal from the beginning was to become the leading platform in the capital markets space by unifying trading, analytics, and data.
Integrating Abel Noser’s products into the TT platform almost two years ago was the first step. But the broader opportunity is in connecting the entire ecosystem—across fixed income, equities, FX, futures, and options—and embedding analytics directly into the trading workflow.
Take futures, for example. With the exception of TT Futures TCA, which we launched last year, there’s virtually no meaningful pre-trade cost analysis available today. Traders often place orders without knowing what they’ll actually cost. We’re solving that by bringing our data and analytics to the point of execution.
On any given day, we can account for a material amount of volume traded in a given futures contract, which gives us a rich dataset to work from. That allows us to offer pre-trade, real-time, and post-trade analytics—all in one place—giving users insight across the entire trade lifecycle.
Across the TT and Abel Noser platforms, we now support around 12,000 unique users, mostly institutional. Bringing all of this together—across products, asset classes, and analytics—is what makes our platform truly powerful.
As regulatory scrutiny and buy-side expectations evolve, how is TT innovating to keep its TCA offering aligned with emerging compliance and performance standards?
One of our other lines of business is Compliance. What we’ve done is integrate that trade surveillance and risk analysis directly into various parts of the platform, leveraging our data across multiple asset classes. There’s a growing demand from clients to ensure regulatory compliance and manage risk effectively across all markets, and we’re building the tools to meet that need.
Looking ahead, what’s your vision for the future of TCA, and how will TT continue to lead and adapt as the market landscape shifts?
The future is really about expanding the use cases for TCA. In the past, it was mostly a box-ticking exercise, but now, thanks to the tremendous computing power we have, we can process massive amounts of data incredibly quickly.
As markets become more transparent and price discovery improves, TCA evolves into a much more valuable tool. It goes far beyond compliance and reporting, helping with order selection, venue choice, and broker selection.
For example, in fixed income, RFQs and portfolio trades are becoming increasingly important. A trader might ask: Should I trade this name with a broker who consistently comes in second but is reliable, or try someone who occasionally offers a better bid? Or should I open the trade to a broader group—maybe 15 participants on a platform like MarketAxess or Tradeweb—to create a more competitive auction?
By enabling these kinds of decisions, TCA transforms from a compliance checkbox into a strategic tool that enhances trading outcomes.
