Itiviti Aims to Speed Up Bloomberg SSEOMS Migration Process

Swedish trading technology provider Itiviti is building out its capabilities to speed up migration projects for those coming off Bloomberg’s Sell-Side Execution and Order Management Solutions (SSEOMS). 

Last April, WatersTechnology broke the news about Bloomberg’s planned exit of its SSEOMS and know-your-customer (KYC) business units. The tech and data giant will cut off support in April 2021. Itiviti was one of the first vendors to step in to offer its products to SSEOMS users.

Speaking during the Waters Wavelength Podcast, Ofir Gefen, head of Asia-Pacific at Itiviti, said the company is creating a template for some of the configurations involved in the migration process to speed it up and avoid bottlenecks. This involves more information sharing between the implementation engineering team and the product team. 

“Predominantly, we’ve been sharing a lot more information; our implementation engineering organization has been sharing information globally. A lot of it is between Europe and Asia and proactively working with the product guys to find ways that we can kind of template some of the configuration,” he said. 

Gefen said most of the migration deals so far have come from Asia and Europe. In Asia, Itiviti is looking to sign another four to five deals within the next six months. 

Firms that signed migration contracts with Itiviti in the third and fourth quarters of 2019 will be ready for the SSEOMS 2021 cutoff deadline. “I think we’ll have the first deployments coming off the assembly lines, probably in the second and into the third quarters of 2020. So these are the people that are ahead of the curve,” he said.

While Itiviti stands to benefit from the migration, Gefen said that firms that have not moved to a new solution—Itiviti’s or another vendor’s—by April 2021 will not be able to accept clients’ orders electronically.

“If your buy-side client, all of the sudden, is pushed to use another broker because your system is end-of-life and basically expired, and they cannot send orders to you, then what will happen is they’ll try something new and maybe they’ll see that it works. … [It] really looks bad. It looks like you cannot manage your technology. You knew this product was going to expire. It reduces the trust of your clients in your ability to manage your technology—and, look, a big part of execution these days is technology,” Gefen said. 

Speedy Configurations

Itiviti will have to balance its workload between firms that require faster deployment—and thus, not as much customization—versus those users that require a bespoke solution.

“This is fantastic when you need bespoke solutions, but when you have a lot of clients that don’t necessarily need a bespoke solution but need a really quick deployment, you want to be able to template the solution so you can kind of almost ‘copy-paste,’” he said. “Now I’m simplifying it; it’s not a simple copy-paste. It still requires some effort on our end, but if we can kind of generalize parts of the SSEOMS solution, so we can almost copy-paste some of it, it allows us to shorten the deployment timeframe.”

Migration times for a fully customized oder management system greatly differ based on size. A small operation that services one market and has about 50 clients can take two to three months. A regional broker servicing 10 markets and 500 clients can take between six and 12 months.

“What takes a lot of calendar time is the work with the individual buy-side clients of that broker-dealer or bank. To migrate them from a solution—because you obviously have to set up some time with them—you have to test with them. You have to do a lot of work on that,” he explains. 

Another initiative at Itiviti meant to speed up the migration process is its recent partnership with Imandra, an artificial intelligence (AI) company that has built an automated reasoning engine. Gefen said the goal of the partnership is to take Imandra’s AI models and apply them to help automate FIX migrations and FIX testing on Itiviti’s Nyfix platform, which offers market connectivity to the buy side, sell side, and trading venues. 

“We understand human nature and there will be procrastinators that will come to us last minute [and] we still want to be able to sign those deals on, and still adhere to what will probably be very short time frames,” he said. “By using this new AI-based technology [we can] automate at least part—if not all—the migration process.”

Itiviti has also grown its staff by taking on some members of the Bloomberg SSEOMS team, including Linda Middleditch, who is now head of product strategy at Itiviti. She was previously the global head of SSEOMS product management at Bloomberg.