When you’re managing a larger size order, you obviously want to reduce the market impact and the information leakage of that order. So our new offering in X-Pro would help you decide, number one, what protocol can — is there levels of liquidity using things like tradability to go into an all-to-all market where you’re requesting price from the entire market, or if you’re looking at lower levels of tradability, you may want to use a number of dealers, discrete dealers, and then if you choose to only use dealers, you would want to know which dealers you should select from. So that offering is really targeted launch in November, but really hopeful to see it on client desktops across the first quarter of ’24.
Richard Schiffman: Hey, Patrick. It’s Rich. And one other thing, we’re talking about adaptive and Adaptive Auto-X and it’s, again, still early days just coming out of the pilot phase, but even from the small number of clients that we have in this initial phase, we’re seeing larger orders coming from it. So remember, it gives the ability to tap into the different protocols that we have available. So a common type of operation in the algo is to leave part of a block order resting in the order book. And then when other parties engage being able to then work that order up to a larger size that gets completed, we call that multiparty workup. And we’ve seen some encouraging early examples of that being used where the initial trade starts out at $500 million or $1 million or a couple of million and we’ve had cases where it gets worked up to $15 million or $20 million.
And that’s all done quietly without showing full size initially. People are concerned about that information leakage, and then quietly working that up to a larger size without the information leakage. So we expect to see greater adoption of that as the Adaptive Auto-X rollout expands.
Patrick O’Shaughnessy: Thank you.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Chris Allen from Citi. Please go ahead.
Chris Concannon: Hey, Chris.
Operator: Chris, your line is open.
Christopher Allen: Sorry, guys. I had in a mute. Just wanted to ask where you guys in the hiring cycle with FTEs up 17% year-over-year, you’re kind of at the end of that cycle. Do you expect prime to basically afford any expense efficiency opportunities longer term?
Chris Concannon: Sure. Obviously, the hiring cycle was quite high over the last few years, quite a competitive market that we entered in ’22 and into the first quarter of ’23. With the layoffs among the large investment banks and across the technology companies that market dynamic has reduced. So it’s a much more friendly hiring environment. We are obviously focused on rolling out products and rolling out solutions and Pragma brings with us probably around 50 technologists, which is a great add to the overall footprint of MarketAxess. And we just see going into 2024, we’re quite comfortable with the hiring marketplace. And obviously, the addition of heads that we’ve already added to the overall footprint of MarketAxess. And then more importantly, we have a number of things that we’re doing on the tech side of re-platforming our platform, rolling out X-Pro and continuing to grow the overall automation solutions.
So we continue to see sizable investments in all of those tech plants and all of those opportunities.
Christopher Allen: Thanks, Chris.
Operator: And we have no further questions in the queue at this time. Chris Concannon, I will turn the call to you for closing remarks.
Chris Concannon: Great. Well, thank you for joining us today. Obviously, we have a very important quarter ahead and are pretty excited about the levels of activity and the number of things that we’re rolling out in this quarter and the quarters ahead. So thank you for joining us, and we’ll talk to you in another quarter.
Operator: And this concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for your participation, and you may now disconnect.
