Société Générale (SG) has rolled out its Alpha electronic trading platform in a move to provide distributors, private banks and wealth managers with the ability to structure products online and execute tradable quotes during market hours.
"The aim of the platform is to provide clients with the ability to quickly quote and trade structured products, starting with reverse exchangeables and auto-calls covering equities and equity indices underlyings," Sohail Raja, e-commerce multi asset product manager at SG, told SRP. "This will allow clients to be in control of the pricing to trade features, allowing sales to focus on value added services to clients based on solutions business engineering capabilities."
Raja said that SG's Alpha platform has been available since 2010 with an initial focus on FX instruments, with Alpha SP for structured products being launched in January this year for a number of pilot clients.
According to Raja, Alpha SP will allow SG to leverage off the firm's single dealer platform encompassing pre- and post-trade functionality, allowing the solutions business technology teams to "focus on efficient pricing and trading" for its clients.
"The effort is supported across global markets - with solutions sales, trading and E-commerce working collaboratively to deliver a complete service to our clients on Alpha SP," he said.
As part of the rollout strategy, said Raja, Alpha SP has been made available in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) first, although the French bank has plans to offer the service to other core markets following client feedback.
SG's click and trade platform has an optimised price discovery function allowing users to execute unlimited price requests and fine-tune each product parameter, as well as post-trade services including dedicated lifecycle management, export functionalities for term-sheets and a legal documentation generator.
Alpha SP currently offers electronic execution for structured products with customisable payoff structures across a range of equity underlyings. Available structures include one or several worst-of underlyings, guaranteed or conditional coupons, and the choice of trading using EUR, CHF, GBP and USD-denominated reverse convertible and knockout/auto-call structures.
SG's launch is the latest move in the click and trade arena and follows similar developments from a number of structured products providers over the last few years including JPMorgan; HSBC in China; BNP Paribas and UBS in the US; and RBS, Credit Suisse and Santander in Europe.
Barclays, which was one of the first providers to develop an electronic platforms for structured notes, BARX IS, has recently launched an FX trading platform in the UK through its stockbroker arm, and has expanded the coverage of its Bmarkets platform to Germany and Switzerland.