Intrade
A multi currency Fx aggregation platform
Intrade is a clutter breaking product in the capital markets segment, in the emergent markets as well as globally. Building Intrade was equal parts engineering and design effort.
Much like most other products in domains like this, the research for Intrade was fairly idiosyncratic (so to speak) and the findings leading to the world class design, fairly eye opening.
The foreign exchange or forex market is the largest financial market in the world. India lies among the new, emergent markets today.
The Forex market has a daily volume of $6.6 trillion, according to the 2019 Triennial Central Bank Survey of FX and OTC derivatives markets. Popular players in the markets with some leading products have been JP Morgan, Citibank, Deutsche Bank, Société Générale etc.
Intrade was building a forex aggregator catering to the participants of the interbank market focussing on India and Emerging market currencies.
What are Forex Aggregators?
Forex aggregators aggregate currency prices from multiple different streams, and add their own Spreads and Skews to create new prices for clients.
Most incumbents have lasted for a while with experiences that have started to date.
The big idea for Intrade was to unite the rules engine and the pricing view to fundamentally reinvent the experience of a price creator.
A Fundamental shift in Pricing Control
A unified Action + Rule view to the trader. More control, more context
The aggregator engine gave a single view to the trader, to look at the price books from multiple upstream sources/venues while also allowed the creation of multiple aggregated streams user configured by the choice of source, weightage, various rules depending on control variables driving widening and narrowing of the book.
Creating a framework for controlling prices using Rule Sets
Currency pair prices are influenced by a variety of rules creating signitificantly complex and abstract construct.
Intrade broke this abstraction down into similarly built rules controlling a plethora of factors like Volatility, Position, PnL, Desired Position etc. that impact price generation.
This framework familiriazed and habituated the user to a pattern of control variables (the cause) and the resultant spread & skew (the effect).
Intrade’s product broke the incumbent rigid frameworks where price controls were separated from views. This fundamental shift brought by Design turned heads.
Hierarchical flow of controls
A hierarchical flow of controls allowed the same rules to be applied differently in different Streams depending on the user settings for that Stream thus allowing granular control.
This framework also was inspired by the pipe pattern, where the flow of output of one serves as an input to another, while having controls to be overriding or additive in nature.
Modular components suiting the diversity of users
Post research, modular components and widgets were explored to meet the needs of different superusers needing customised layouts both within a window and also a multi-window layout.
Designed to optimize for desktop screen sizes, Sight Distance, Information Latency and density
Fast moving figures, criticalilty of highlight, and varied ergonomics of systems
It was designed keeping in mind the limited real estate available on a traders desktop. Also keeping in mind the high density and low latency nature of the information which the user needs to interact with to make a decision and act quickly on it.
Intrade’s pricing visuals were optimized for Maximum Sight Distance accomodation. From experience, typically traders could go so far as 6ft while keeping an eye monitors and following movements.
Intrade’s product broke the incumbent rigid frameworks where price controls were separated from views. This fundamental shift brought by Design turned heads
The nature of Intrade’s business and engineering promise created a lot of nuanced design decision right from decrease on-screen rendering times to visual markers that create familiarity and habit. Being an active participant in the engineering and the design of the product, with Intrade we managed to deliver on the promise of a world-class trading product from markets without an established history of FX software.
Intrade
A multi currency Fx aggregation platform
Intrade is a clutter breaking product in the capital markets segment, in the emergent markets as well as globally. Building Intrade was equal parts engineering and design effort. Much like most other products in domains like this, the research for Intrade was fairly idiosyncratic (so to speak) and the findings leading to the world class design, fairly eye opening.
The foreign exchange or forex market is the largest financial market in the world. India lies among the new, emergent markets today.
The Forex market has a daily volume of $6.6 trillion, according to the 2019 Triennial Central Bank Survey of FX and OTC derivatives markets. Popular players in the markets with some leading products have been JP Morgan, Citibank, Deutsche Bank, Société Générale etc.
Intrade was building a forex aggregator catering to the participants of the interbank market focussing on India and Emerging market currencies.
What are Forex Aggregators?
Forex aggregators aggregate currency prices from multiple different streams, and add their own Spreads and Skews to create new prices for clients.
Most incumbents have lasted for a while with experiences that have started to date.
The big idea for Intrade was to unite the rules engine and the pricing view to fundamentally reinvent the experience of a price creator.
A Fundamental shift in Pricing Control
A unified Action + Rule view to the trader. More control, more context
The aggregator engine gave a single view to the trader, to look at the price books from multiple upstream sources/venues while also allowed the creation of multiple aggregated streams user configured by the choice of source, weightage, various rules depending on control variables driving widening and narrowing of the book.
Creating a framework for controlling prices using Rule Sets
Currency pair prices are influenced by a variety of rules creating signitificantly complex and abstract construct. Intrade broke this abstraction down into similarly built rules controlling a plethora of factors like Volatility, Position, PnL, Desired Position etc. that impact price generation.
This framework familiriazed and habituated the user to a pattern of control variables (the cause) and the resultant spread & skew (the effect).
Intrade’s product broke the incumbent rigid frameworks where price controls were separated from views. This fundamental shift brought by Design turned heads.
Hierarchical flow of controls
A hierarchical flow of controls allowed the same rules to be applied differently in different Streams depending on the user settings for that Stream thus allowing granular control.
This framework also was inspired by the pipe pattern, where the flow of output of one serves as an input to another, while having controls to be overriding or additive in nature.
Modular components suiting the diversity of users
Post research, modular components and widgets were explored to meet the needs of different superusers needing customised layouts both within a window and also a multi-window layout.
Designed to optimize for desktop screen sizes, Sight Distance, Information Latency and density.
Fast moving figures, criticalilty of highlight, and varied ergonomics of systems
It was designed keeping in mind the limited real estate available on a traders desktop. Also keeping in mind the high density and low latency nature of the information which the user needs to interact with to make a decision and act quickly on it.
Intrade’s pricing visuals were optimized for Maximum Sight Distance accomodation. From experience, typically traders could go so far as 6ft while keeping an eye monitors and following movements.
Our relationship with Intrade was special. While designing the product we consulted on engineering as well.
The nature of Intrade’s business and engineering promise created a lot of nuanced design decision right from decreased on-screen rendering times to visual markers that create familiarity and habit. Being an active participant in the engineering and the design of the product, with Intrade we managed to deliver on the promise of a world-class trading product from markets without an established history of FX software.