TransFICC Secures Further Investment

Fixed income and derivatives markets connectivity provider TransFICC has closed a Series A extension for $17 million. Led by AlbionVC, all existing institutional shareholders took part in this investment round, which follows the original Series A for $7.8 million, announced in April 2020.

TransFICC’s investors are AlbionVC, Citi, HSBC, Illuminate Financial, ING Ventures, and Main Incubator (the Early Stage CVC unit of Commerzbank Group). The new investment will primarily be used to expand TransFICC’s engineering teams, to support additional venue connectivity and automated workflows in US Rates and credit markets, including US Treasuries, high yield, investment grade, IRS, repos, munis, MBS and CDS products.

Additionally, the firm says new products will be developed, which includes a complete e-trading system, incorporating a trader desktop interface. The investment will also fund new sales and customer support teams, aligned with what it terms an ambitious growth strategy and geographical expansion through new data centres in North America and Continental Europe.

“As banks and asset managers focus on automating trading workflows to deliver increased efficiency, TransFICC’s ‘One API’ has been implemented at some of the largest Fixed Income trading banks and Exchanges,” says Steve Toland, co-founder of TransFICC. “As we build on this success, we are very happy to have attracted additional investment from our existing shareholders, which will be used to expand our Engineering teams, develop new products, open new offices in New York and Brussels, and add to our salesforce.”

Tom McKee, co-founder of TransFICC, adds, “We have already built a modern, robust and cost-effective alternative to legacy systems, but driven by client requirements we are expanding our product suite to deliver a full e-trading system, which will enable clients to also trade manually using our software. As we add more clients and automate more complex workflows it is also important that we continue to invest in our technology platform, to deliver fast and scalable technology, which keeps pace with microsecond price updates and provides an audit trail for best execution.”

TransFICC’s clients include eight top tier investment banks and two of the largest exchange groups. “TransFICC’s one API for e-trading service has a huge opportunity to become the defacto standard API gateway between banks and trading venues,” says Cat McDonald, investor at AlbionVC, who also joins TransFICC’s Board. “Our faith in the API’s superiority and future success is borne out by the eight banks and two exchanges that are now using it, as well as the long pipeline of prospective clients. We expect TransFICC’s service to continue outperforming against expectations, thereby confirming the industry-changing nature of what Steve and the team have created.” 

Jonathan Lofthouse, global head of markets technology at Citi, adds, “The market structure in fixed income is evolving rapidly, and trading firms need modern, simple and innovative technology solutions to automate their trading workflows and quickly connect with numerous venues. TransFICC has been leading the way in API translation and continues to develop new products in response to client demand.” 

Meanwhile, Seth Osher, global head of flow fixed income IT at HSBC, says, “This additional investment will let TransFICC further extend its connectivity reach and build additional components of the electronic trading stack.  Having new UI’s and tools will make it even easier for TransFICC’s clients to adopt their technology and we are very excited to be working with them.”