Month: September 2015

Financial technology provider Fidessa unveiled a new partnership program that aims to allow third-party services into Fidessa’s global trading workflow platform.

“Market participants have always recognized the role that technology can play in delivering value and demonstrating relevance to their customers. The challenge with this today, however, is that many new innovations need to be plugged directly into the traders’ workflow in order to be truly effective, compliant and resilient,” according to a Fidessa press statement.

“Fidessa recognized that its global distribution and workflow infrastructure could be used to curate and deliver third party applications as well as our own,” said Steve Grob, director of group strategy at Fidessa. He added, “Our role in this program is to evaluate and select the right partners that add real value and integrate their tools with Fidessa’s platform, data and community.”

The program is built around a technical framework that allows multiple third-party applications to work directly with Fidessa’s trading workflow software. These third parties can also leverage Fidessa’s infrastructure and global reach to provide “a unified trading experience.”

The first partner in this Fidessa program is OTAS Technologies, a market analysis solution provider.

“We are excited to have been selected as the first partner in this program”, comments Tom Doris, CEO of OTAS Technologies. “We have worked closely with Fidessa’s development, deployment and compliance teams as part of this initiative. This now positions us well for the next phase of our growth by providing a common lexicon for the industry to interpret trading performance across increasingly complex markets.”

Why OTAS? As James Blackburn, global head of sell-side equities product marketing, explained, “The OTAS tools form a key part of our optimised trading initiative and sit alongside our Order Performance Monitor. They provide traders with detailed market micro-structure analysis and the ability to drill down and understand why their orders are trading the way they are, as well as what factors might be influencing them.”

Blackburn added, “Going forward we will add more and more of these tools to further enrich and add value to the trading capabilities that we provide to our clients. This will ensure that the very best new financial markets technology, regardless of who builds it, will make its true impact felt on the trading desks of today and in the future.”

OTAS Technologies has announced Fidessa is integrating its market data analytics into its trading platform. The announcement is part of Fidessa’s Partnership Program, which allows select third-party content providers to implement programs into Fidessa’s trading workflow.

OTAS represents Fidessa’s first partner in the new program.

“OTAS is a valuable addition to our Optimized Trading initiative sitting alongside our Order Performance Monitor to provide our customers with valuable insights into their order performance and their trading strategies,” said James Blackburn, global head of sell-side equities product marketing at Fidessa, in a statement.

“Our goal is to provide our customers with the best available technology regardless of who builds it. OTAS provides a best of breed product that optimizes trading outcomes offering a complete breakdown of market conditions and allowing traders to adjust orders in real time based on dynamic market micro-structure changes.”

To read more on the announcement and Fidessa’s program, check out Joanne Faulkner’sInside Market Data story here.

Data and trading technology vendor Fidessa will today launch a new Partnership Program to provide added value to its trading customers, and has named analytics provider OTAS Technologies as the first third-party provider to integrate directly into its trading workflow platform.

James Blackburn, global head of sell-side equities product marketing at Fidessa, says the program helps solves the vendor’s problem of wanting to add value to its customers day-to-day activities without having to embark on “ambitious” internal builds.

“News aggregation, structured and unstructured news and data…that’s something that really excites us. We knew that we weren’t in the position to build some of these exciting new applications but we thought that by bringing both sides together we could work out what our clients wanted and we could really just take in best-of-breed,” Blackburn says.

Specialized analytical content has become increasingly vital to investment strategies over the last two years, adds Tom Doris, chief executive at OTAS. However, trading platform providers have realised that it is not something they can effectively build in-house, so they need to look beyond internal builds to provide their clients with more granular data, he says.

Fidessa, which started looking at the partnership with OTAS about a year ago, is not the first investment platform to explore becoming an ecosystem of content providers. “Others have effectively said ‘if you have any content you can stick it in there’, whereas Fidessa have taken a much more measured approach to curate the content and integrate it into their workflow…. they are in the coal-face of understanding how a trader gets his job done and understanding what would be irritating versus helpful,” Doris says, adding that Fidessa understands “how to take the information that we can extract from the market data and how to put it in front of the users exactly when it’s most needed and most useful.”

Doris adds that while there will always be challenges when it comes to integrating content to a single system, OTAS benefits from its use of HTML5 technologies, which are becoming the norm. “Had we tried to do this five years ago it would have been a much more onerous task,” he says.

Not an app store

Fidessa is currently evaluating future partners for its platform, particularly companies developing news aggregation, social media and visualization, and has identified a number of companies who would add valuable content. However, Blackburn says the Partnership Program is “not an app store concept. We’re looking at two or three possible partners by the end of the year but we’re not going to turn on 150 third-party applications.”

Blackburn adds that the vendor is taking a hard look at HTML5 technology as well as unstructured data, where the challenge is filtering out the noise. “Opening up a firehose doesn’t solve a problem because too many source signals are almost worse than no signals at all. Our challenge is to find the best-of-breed in that sector that can filter out all the nonsense to just show me stuff that is relevant,” he adds.