Prime brokers run complex books - sourcing liquidity for shorts and locates, managing collateral and counterparty exposure, and meeting reporting obligations across multiple regulatory regimes. Equilend connects 145+ firms on a single platform, from front-office execution to post-trade automation, data, and digital infrastructure. One ecosystem, one consistent trade record, from booking to settlement.
Challenge 1
Supply moves fast
Hard-to-borrow inventory dries up within hours and slow sourcing means you pay the special rate. When a name goes special, the desk that finds supply first pays the least and everyone after pays up.
Sourcing is fragmented
Chasing lenders across phone, email, and disconnected venues costs time on exactly the names where it is tightest. The desk ends up working relationships and screens instead of covering the position.
Cost compounds with delay
Every hour spent locating supply turns into basis points lost on positions you have to cover anyway. The longer the search runs, the worse the rate and the wider the gap to your benchmark.
Challenge 2
Rates drift above market
Financing across phone, email, and scattered venues means you miss better levels and refinance at last resort. Without a full view of the market, you cannot tell whether the rate you took was the best one available.
Capital stays trapped
Positions you cannot net keep tying up risk-weighted assets and balance sheet you could put to work. Capital locked in offsetting trades is capital the desk cannot deploy anywhere else.
Setup slows new flow
Every new counterparty means another bilateral agreement to negotiate before you can transact. Legal and onboarding queues can hold up flow for weeks while pricing moves against you.
Challenge 3
Locates must be provable
Regulators expect firms to maintain auditable, point-in-time evidence that a valid locate was obtained before a short sale. Manual processes and fragmented records can create documentation gaps, making examinations more difficult and increasing compliance risk.
Reporting punishes inaccurate data
Inaccurate booking flows straight into SFTR, 10c-1a, and CSDR filings as errors. Each rejected or mismatched report is rework for the team and fresh exposure with the regulator.
Compliance competes with speed
Manual checks slow execution at the same moment the desk needs to move. Every added step is time the trade sits exposed and the rate can shift.
Challenge 4
Fails are expensive
Failing trades can quickly become costly. A single break ties up capital, draws charges, and strains the counterparty relationship.
Bad instructions cause most breaks
Incorrect settlement instructions drive roughly 30% of fails. Most of these breaks trace back to data that was already wrong before the trade settled.
T+1 shrinks the window
With EU, UK, and Swiss markets moving to T+1 settlement in October 2027, firms have up to 83% less time to catch a break. A problem you once had a full day to fix now has to be caught within hours.
Equilend connects prime brokers across four solution areas - Trading, Workflow Automation, Data & Insights, and Digital - so that execution, post-trade, data, and counterparty agreement workflows stay aligned across the full securities finance lifecycle.
Equilend's Trading solutions help prime brokers source liquidity, supply locates, and refinance positions across general collateral and hard-to-borrow securities. Powered by NGT, firms gain access to one of the world's largest electronic securities finance trading networks, connecting more than 145+ firms across 50+ global markets with high levels of straight-through processing and operational efficiency.
Equilend's Workflow Automation solutions help prime brokers automate and connect critical securities finance workflows across the trade lifecycle. From Front Office Automation and Spire to Post-Trade & Regulatory reporting, the portfolio improves operational efficiency, reduces manual intervention, and helps firms scale while meeting the demands of increasingly complex markets.
Equilend's Data & Insights shows the buy-side what the securities lending market is doing right now. The coverage is deep: $52T+ in lendable assets across 50+ markets. Orbisa, Equilend's buy-side intelligence platform, delivers daily Predicted Short Interest, Short Squeeze Scores, intraday borrow demand, financing rates, and more. The data is accessible through the UI, API, Bloomberg, or Excel add-in. With Equilend market data, you can benchmark your program against peers and see borrow demand across your holdings.
Equilend's Digital solution help modernize securities finance by creating trusted, connected workflows across counterparties. Powered by 1Source, firms can synchronize trade lifecycle data and improve transparency. 1Source eliminates costly reconciliation inefficiencies in securities lending by serving as a single source of truth using smart contracts on a permissioned distributed ledger to unify post-execution workflows and deliver true operational transformation.
145+
Firms trade on NGT every day
$230B
Daily average notional
$52T+
Lendable assets
EquiLend’s Head of Trading Solutions, Mike Norwood, shares his July securities finance market review, highlighting record platform activity, strong fixed income growth, and sustained global demand for hard-to-borrow securities.
Six months ago, we wrote about how AI-linked equities had redefined the securities lending landscape in 2025, a year shaped by speculative positioning, breakout IPOs, and the kind of volatility that provides opportunity for the market.
The global securities lending industry just wrapped up its strongest first half on record.
See how Equilend connects Trading, Workflow Automation, Data & Insights, and Digital infrastructure for prime brokers in a personalized demo.
Equilend gives prime brokers one connected ecosystem for the full securities finance lifecycle: trading on NGT, Post-Trade and Regulatory services, securities lending data through Datalend, and Digital solutions through 1Source. The solutions interconnect, so a trade booked on NGT carries through to reconciliation, data, and reporting without re-keying. Prime brokers use it to cover short positions, supply locates, refinance the book, reconcile trades, and meet regulatory reporting obligations across the global marketplace.
NGT is the central securities lending trading venue used by more than 145 firms each day. Prime brokers trade general collateral and hard-to-borrow securities against the largest inventory in the market, with full straight-through processing and 24/5 operating hours. That depth of liquidity helps the desk cover shorts and provide locates through our Front Office Automation solutions without constant manual intervention.
Equilend's post-trade suite pre-matches trade details and settlement instructions before settlement, so mismatches are caught early. Settlement Monitor flags potential fails and CSDR penalty exposure, while real-time Returns and Recalls keep the desk T+1 ready. Unified Comparison reconciles more than $4.1 trillion transactions processed per day to surface breaks before they cost P&L.
Equilend helps prime brokers streamline regulatory reporting by reusing trade data already captured across the Equilend ecosystem, including trades executed on NGT. By reducing manual data preparation and enrichment, firms can improve reporting workflows for regulations such as SFTR and prepare for evolving regulatory requirements. Equilend provides technology and data to support these reporting processes but is not a registered reporting agent for SFTR.
Prime brokers use Datalend to access comprehensive securities finance data sourced in real-time from Equilend's global trading and lifecycle ecosystem. The desk can benchmark borrow rates, analyze broker-to-broker and lender-to-broker activity, and price short positions using global, cleansed, and de-duplicated market data.
Stay ahead in securities finance with expert insights, market trends, and timely updates.
