Jane Street | Best Overall ETF Liquidity Provider/Market Maker | Best Market Maker/Authorised Participant – Equity ETFs | Best Market Maker/Authorised Participant – Fixed Income ETFs | Best Institutional ETF Broker
Jessica Clancy, ETF Strategist, Jane Street, talks about their business and their awards’ wins this year.
What is the size and scale of your business at the moment?
With over 23 years of experience trading ETFs, we’ve developed the capacity to facilitate trades across execution methods, asset classes, and product segments. Our global footprint continues to grow with offices now in New York, London, Amsterdam, Hong Kong, and Singapore–allowing us to provide 24-hour liquidity across 200+ electronic exchanges, in 45+ countries around the world. In Europe, we’re a registered authorised participant across all major ETF issuers and provide liquidity to institutions across 40 EMEA countries. In addition to being one of the leading liquidity providers in ETFs, we’ve also become well-established in liquidity providing across equities, fixed income, commodities, futures, and options.
What trends have you seen over the past year?
Fixed income ETFs continue to demonstrate their value as a useful tool for investors to gain entry to more inaccessible segments of the market quickly. As interest rate volatility remained elevated throughout 2023, fixed income ETF trading activity was up 45 per cent compared to their 2021 average, while equity ETFs were up just 5 per cent. Additionally, traditional active managers are looking at ETFs as another means of distributing their strategies following the success observed in the US. Nearly 30 per cent of active ETFs available in Europe were launched in 2023, and we expect this momentum to continue in 2024. When an issuer is considering bringing a new strategy to market, they will propose sample baskets and request indicative quotes to understand how these strategies would trade on exchange and in block sizes. In turn, we’ll often provide feedback and insight regarding the impact on the underlying holdings in different scenarios.
What plans do you have for growing your business over the coming year?
In the upcoming year, our plans for business growth primarily revolve around continuing to find innovative ways to support our clients and the ETF issuers we work with to help ensure the industry is operating as efficiently as possible. We look at the ETF ecosystem as a whole and believe that healthy, sustainable growth is good for all market participants involved. A few of the ways we try to help accomplish this are by looking for quality people as the company continues to grow, as well as investing in new technology that complements and helps scale our human capital. This allows us to continue expanding our liquidity provision as we look to expand our pricing capabilities for the new strategies that come to market.
Where do you see the ETF industry going in terms of products over the coming year?
ETFs are more accessible than they’ve ever been – they don’t have investment minimums, lock up periods or require ISDA agreements compared to other wrappers and instruments. Issuers are consistently looking for ways to offer products that meet emerging client needs and deliver institutional strategies that have previously been unavailable to retail investors. This has led to a wave of new strategies including fixed maturity ETFs and those with derivative underlyings such as options. We’ve seen material inflows into these product sets and adoption by a wide variety of clients. As these corners of the ETF space are increasingly commercialised, we’ll likely observe fee compression as issuers continue building solutions for different market environments.
