Advantage Futures, one of the industry’s highest volume futures commission merchants (FCMs), processing over 5.3 billion contracts since the firm’s launch in 2003, has migrated to ION’s cleared derivatives trade processing platform, XTP.
ION’s continued investment in XTP’s capabilities has helped it onboard a rapidly growing number of futures commission merchants and global banks.
XTP will allow Advantage Futures to scale its business even further and create a more efficient, unified experience for clients with real-time visibility of positions, commissions, fees, margins, cash flows, and risk.
“We now deliver real-time data and automation capabilities”
Advantage Futures, which processed over 325 million contracts in 2023, serves a diverse client base, including professional traders, institutional clients, exchange-traded funds, foreign and domestic non-clearing futures brokers, hedge funds, and individual traders. Its clients are domiciled in 64 countries, territories, and jurisdictions and can access over 20 futures exchanges around the world.
The Chicago-based FCM operates an agency model brokerage and does not trade for its own account; thereby avoiding a conflict of interest by not competing with client trading.
The agency broker has been using the same post-trade technology platform for decades. By migrating to ION’s XTP, legacy technology will be a thing of the past as the Chicago-based firm leverages ION’s flexible, modern solution that provides extensive automation across clearing and settlement workflows.
Joe Guinan, Chairman and CEO of Advantage Futures, said: “In the two decades since founding Advantage Futures, we’ve expanded from a small boutique to among the industry’s highest volume clearing firms serving some of the world’s high-volume traders. As we continue to scale the business, we prioritize giving clients best-in-class, customized technology to seamlessly navigate an increasingly complex market. Having successfully completed the migration to ION’s XTP, we now deliver real-time data and automation capabilities, meeting client needs to process ever-growing trade volumes quickly and efficiently.”
Francesco Margini, Chief Product Officer for Cleared Derivatives, ION Markets, said: “We are very pleased about our partnership with Advantage Futures, one of the industry’s highest volume clearing firms. The transition from their legacy back-office solution to XTP was completed in record time, leveraging ION’s established methodology and tools developed to manage large and complex migration projects. The Advantage-XTP rollout demonstrates ION’s proven track record in bringing new products to the market and the strong discipline required for a timely and successful delivery to customers.”
