Citi to Standardize Listed-Derivatives Trading with Fidessa

The project, slated for completion in the first half of 2012, will replace a patchwork of legacy internal and third-party hosted systems. It will connect Citi to 28 global markets via 14 gateways hosted in Fidessa's Chicago, Hong Kong, London, Mumbai, Sydney and Tokyo datacenters

"One of the most pressing needs was to have a consistent execution offering across the board on a global basis," says Jerome Kemp, managing director and global head of exchange-traded derivatives at Citi. "This was clearly one of my top priorities when I started in early 2011."

It took about 12 weeks to select a vendor, according to Kemp. "We did not go through a formal request-for-proposal (RFP) process, since the number of offerings in this space with the necessary level of sophistication is limited,” he says.

Kemp's team evaluated each offering based on market reach, vendor support, available algorithmic strategies and latency.

"Measuring the return on investment (ROI) of any vendor platform is more of an art than a science," says Kemp. "The best indication will be the amount of throughput coming across the platform as well as the new clients we will be able to recruit with the launch of this trading technology."

This implementation is Fidessa’s second at Citi, which deployed the vendor's equities trading offering earlier this year.

Kemp says Citi expects to see some savings by decommissioning multiple legacy systems and exchange connections.

"Fidessa will manage all the physical servers, market connections, market data and client-screened deployments as well as the application programming interfaces (APIs) and physical links to the exchanges," says Dan Smalley, senior vice president and director of business development at Fidessa.

Citi will begin the first phase of user acceptance testing (UAT) in early December. Once each phase's testing is done, the bank will put those portions of the interface and market access into production.

"From day one, we expect to have system functionality within our various locations globally," says Kemp. "As we continue, we will add markets and more functionality. We do not want a situation where one location can access a market and another cannot."

"Anyone from any location will have access to market data, data visualization and trading capabilities on those markets," adds Smalley.