Horizon Trading Solutions: OEMS, market making and implementation

Horizon Trading Solutions develops electronic trading systems for agency execution and principal trading. For a bank or broker, that can mean managing client orders and routing execution; for a market-making desk, it can mean calculating prices, managing quotes and hedging inventory. Horizon’s role in those workflows is the software and its contracted operating services. The client determines the trading business, accounts, markets and strategy that the platform supports.[1]

The OEMS is designed to accommodate different levels of dealer involvement. A broker can combine manually handled orders with automated strategies and custom workflow scripts, rather than assuming every incoming order follows the same path. Horizon describes the ability to integrate third-party applications and in-house algorithms, as well as internalisation and matching functions. A meaningful demonstration would follow an order through its intended states, including an exception that returns it to a dealer and the corresponding messages to the originating client system.[2]

For market making, the published scope includes equities, futures, options, warrants, ETFs and other derivative structures. Pricing can use supplied models, a firm’s own engine or a third-party model integrated through Extend. Inventory views can be organised by underlying, expiry or instrument, with quantity, profit and loss and sensitivities such as delta and gamma. Built-in delta hedging can use thresholds and proxy instruments; a proprietary hedging policy can require additional development. These are desk-control mechanisms, so their usefulness depends on the chosen valuation inputs and the client’s actual inventory and hedging mandate.[4]

The integration options include FIX and REST interfaces, with Java and Scala APIs for Extend development. These routes support different tasks: receiving orders or external data, embedding business logic, and connecting reference data, middle-office or other applications. A development specification should identify the event that triggers each interface and the record returned to the rest of the platform, particularly when custom logic can change an order, price or risk decision.[1]

Horizon’s connectivity service covers order maintenance, routing and tagging, quote messages, market data, drop copies and trade capture. These message paths need to be reconciled with the customer’s entitlement and account structure. A listed venue adapter establishes an available technical route; the deployment still needs the relevant session configuration, certification work and counterparties. This distinction is particularly useful when a project spans direct exchange access and broker-provided execution, because the same user interface can sit above different access arrangements.[7]

On 22 April 2026, Horizon announced FixConnect, a self-service FIX configuration tool within Trader Workspace. The release describes configuring, testing and deploying sessions without restarting the process, using an architecture built with Aeron. Its practical purpose is to separate routine session changes from heavier technical deployment work. The release’s continuous-operation design should be evaluated against the client’s change controls: who may alter mappings, how a configuration is tested, and how a failed change is reversed. It does not change the separately published support-hours schedule.[6]

Horizon’s reviewed product and contact pages do not publish a software or hosting rate card. Commercial scope is therefore established through a proposal covering the selected trading components, development work and operating model. A request for pricing is more useful when it identifies the desk workflow, venues and connectivity, production and recovery environments, and the division of work between the customer and Horizon. The published service catalogue provides concrete choices for that discussion, without supplying a standard per-user or per-order price.[14]

Horizon publishes a project sequence based on PRINCE2 methods, moving from an agreed business requirement to client acceptance. This makes the project’s decision points more tangible than a generic promise of rapid onboarding: scope is approved, technical work is assigned, readiness is reviewed and completion is acknowledged by the customer.[8]

Deployment design can use exchange colocation or proximity hosting and several network arrangements, including cross-connects, leased lines, VPNs and public-cloud links. The hosting page also describes on-demand Azure environments for proofs of concept. That specific proof-of-concept offer should not be read as a commitment that every production installation runs on Azure. Production and recovery placement should follow the chosen managed-service configuration and the connectivity needed by the trading desk.[11]

A dated completed deployment is the 13 May 2026 announcement of Albilad Capital’s official platform launch in Saudi Arabia. The release describes market-making and brokerage capabilities, including order management, algorithmic execution and real-time monitoring. It establishes a named institution moving into an operating platform, rather than merely signing a selection agreement. The announcement is useful evidence of the combined agency and principal workflow; its promotional statements do not supply an independently measured execution benchmark or establish the legal permissions of another Horizon customer.[17]

Horizon describes support coverage as 24/6: from Monday at 08:00 in Hong Kong through Friday at 19:00 in Montréal, with Sunday coverage for Middle Eastern clients. Its published model includes first-, second- and third-level support during the service window. The local-city wording matters when arranging handover across desks and regions. A client requiring coverage for an additional market session should put that requirement into its service agreement rather than infer continuous staffed support from the system’s ability to operate continuously.[13]

Application management extends into the running environment. Horizon describes daily Morning Checks, assistance with production issues and market rehearsals, and monitoring of infrastructure, middleware and business connectivity. Examples include CPU, memory, disk and network capacity, database or Java components, gateway connectivity and licensing. Optional alerting, dashboards and custom monitoring can be part of the arrangement. These functions help define an incident runbook: identify the affected layer, establish who receives the alert and decide whether the response belongs to the customer’s infrastructure team or Horizon’s application team.[12]

Horizon Compass records routing decisions, market snapshots, child orders and execution information, and can feed transaction-cost analysis. Its configurable policies allow a firm to express how an order should reach its chosen venues. Those records can support review of the firm’s execution process, but they are evidence generated by a configured workflow. The software does not decide which legal obligation applies to a particular broker, client or instrument, nor does a router’s venue list grant trading access.[3]

The distinction is equally relevant to principal trading. A customer’s market-making activity uses its own pricing policy, positions and hedging arrangements; Horizon supplies the technology that applies and monitors that logic. The market-making product description establishes those software functions. It is not an offer by Horizon to act as the customer’s liquidity counterparty.[4]

The website’s legal notice identifies Horizon Trading Solutions as a French société par actions simplifiée registered in Paris under number 835 188 426, with its registered office at 60 rue de Monceau, Paris. This is the corporate identity behind the reviewed website and product material. The website terms should not substitute for the enterprise software and service agreement when identifying the supplier and obligations for a particular deployment.[15]

Horizon Software announced its change of name to Horizon Trading Solutions on 27 March 2024. The announcement positioned the name around the company’s agency and principal trading activities in equities and derivatives. Horizon Software is consequently an important historical alias for identifying earlier implementations and references, rather than a separate provider to count alongside the present business.[16]

Operator

Horizon Trading Solutions, a French société par actions simplifiée

Service scope

Agency execution, order routing, market-making and risk software, with Extend development tools, FIX connectivity and managed application services.

Customer types

Banks; Brokerages; Market-making firms

Delivery

On premises; Hosted; API; Managed service

Pricing publication

Quote only

Headquarters

Paris, France

Platforms

Horizon OEMS; Horizon Compass; Horizon Extend; Trader Workspace; FixConnect

Integrations

FIX; REST; Java and Scala APIs; CME / Globex; Eurex; Cboe Europe Equities

Pricing scope

Commercial proposals depend on trading components, custom work, connectivity and the selected managed-service model; reviewed pages do not publish a software or hosting rate card.

Implementation

Requirements approval, project definition, tracked implementation, production-readiness review and customer acceptance. Hosting can use customer infrastructure or Horizon-managed dedicated or shared infrastructure.

Support

Published 24/6 coverage runs from Monday 08:00 Hong Kong to Friday 19:00 Montréal, with Sundays for Middle Eastern clients; application management and monitoring are scoped services.

Permissions and regulatory scope

Technology for the customer’s agency and principal trading workflows. Routing records and risk controls support the configured process; client trading permissions and market access are separate.

Provider metadata checked 20 Oct 2026Source 15Source 1Source 2Source 3Source 4Source 5Source 6Source 7Source 11Source 8Source 12Source 13Source 14Source 16

Product development and a customer’s production-upgrade calendar run on different schedules. Horizon’s delivery-process page describes two-week roadmap increments and a distinct lifecycle for market-access upgrades. Its deployment page says upgrades are applied when appropriate for each client, with an expectation of at least one upgrade annually. The two-week development cadence should therefore not be turned into a promise that every customer receives a production upgrade every fortnight. Exchange-driver changes, regression work and client release approval need their own deployment plan.[9][10]

Extend’s published approach is to let customers add proprietary logic while reusing the platform. Horizon says the parts clients add belong to those clients and remain confidential, and it offers architectural assistance, training and development support. The project agreement should translate that general statement into an inventory of client code, supplied components and maintenance duties. That is especially relevant when a custom strategy relies on shared interfaces that may change during subsequent platform upgrades.[5]