UBS AG announced today that its global equities business is launching a new alternative trading system for crossing orders in US stocks.

The firm said that the new crossing pool will enable client orders to interact with UBS’s US equity order flow – including client agency flow and its trading desks. It trades around 690 million shares a day in the US, and this large pool of order flow will now be available to cross with UBS clients’ direct market access and algorithmic trading orders in this new non-displayed crossing pool called UBS PIN ATS.

UBS created the ATS to complement its internal crossing network, “UBS PIN Cross.” That network, which has been operating since 2006, offers interaction with a subset of the firm’s equity order flow – approximately 350 million shares a day – almost half of which is retail order flow. This internal crossing pool was designed to discretely cross with only natural liquidity, without information leakage.

Raul Esquivel, head of equities in the Americas at UBS, said, “The combination of these two platforms gives clients the best of both worlds, a natural-only pool of liquidity for highly sensitive situations, and the much broader PIN ATS pool, which brings together a wide variety of order flows.”

“PIN Cross has been very effective, but the selective nature of this internal pool did exclude certain sources of crossing opportunities,” added Will Sterling, global head of direct execution at UBS. “PIN ATS will give clients access to an additional, more inclusive pool of liquidity, which we believe will offer clients incrementally improved crossing opportunities – translating to reduced signaling risk and measurable spread savings.”

UBS PIN ATS was registered as an ATS with the US Securities and Exchange Commission earlier this month. Clients trading electronically with UBS via algorithms or DMA tools will automatically have access to the ATS with no additional trading steps or fees. The ATS order book will not be published.