Itiviti Looks to Capitalize on Bloomberg's SSEOMS Exit

Swedish trading and technology provider Itiviti is making preparations in the hope that it will win over new clients migrating off of Bloomberg’s Sell-Side Execution and Order Management Solutions (SSEOMS) unit. 

Since WatersTechnology broke the news about Bloomberg’s planned exit of its SSEOMS and KYC business units, Itiviti has received commitments from SSEOMS clients to use its multi-asset order management system (OMS), says Robert Mackay, the vendor’s CEO. To help win those potential converts, it is looking to build out its capacity to better handle migration projects.

“Given the commitments we have already, we’re going to have a substantial increase in our implementation projects in the second half of this year,” Mackay says. “Rather than deal with that problem later in the year, I want to make sure we have the capacity available now because it’s abundantly clear we’re going to have a rush of projects in the second half of this year and into next year.”

Frankly, right now, we’ll take as many SSEOMS staff as we can.

Robert Mackay

There is a degree of coordination required to make sure Itiviti is able to spread the migration projects evenly through to the end of 2020. To help with this, Itiviti is taking on some staff from SSEOMS to help smooth that process out. Mackay says the firm will be announcing new hires in the next week and beyond. Itiviti, as a whole, is looking to fill 79 roles—the majority of which are client-facing—to assist with the company’s growth plans. 

“We’ll be getting a variety of talent from the SSEOMS organization into those roles,” he says. “Well, frankly right now, we’ll take as many SSEOMS staff as we can. Clearly, a number of them have found roles within Bloomberg, which is great. But for those that haven’t or for those who have been working with customers of SSEOMS that are open to join us, we’re delighted to bring them on board. We need support teams, implementation teams, and professional services staff.”

Out of the 170 customers or so using Bloomberg’s SSEOMS, Mackay says Itiviti is in discussions with almost all of them at various stages. While a number of them are not yet at the commitment stage, there are some that have already agreed to adopt Itiviti’s OMS.

“For those that are [migrating to Itiviti’s OMS], we’ll start on those projects earlier. For those that aren’t, we need to be transparent with them and be clear about when we have the capacity in terms of time and when we’re booked up. It’s a scheduling problem and we’re being fairly transparent with our clients,” he adds.

The migration will not involve any development work, Mackay says. Migrations will only involve existing functionalities, which could mean some building of customized user interfaces and building specific workflows, where necessary. 

“The most important phases of a potential implementation is requirements gathering where we have our professional services staff—both technical and financial staff—working with the clients to flesh out what interfaces are going to be built, if any, and what workflows we want to implement, understanding the scope of the project and then agreeing on a project plan. We put our joint team in place to go execute on that,” he says.

Mackay explains that some of these projects should be fairly straightforward, such as for the trade files it will need to generate, and the back-office interface. “Again, front-to-back office interfaces are not too complex. There is nothing in these projects that gives us undue concern. We haven’t hit any major hiccups. They are fairly cookie-cutter projects. But, you know, we don’t know exactly how every client is using SSEOMS, and inevitably there are wrinkles along the way and there are clients who may be using SSEOMS in fairly non-standard ways. When we come across some of those we will have to deal with them,” he adds.

The migration process could last up to six months, Mackay continues. “Given that we’re onboarding people who know SSEOMS very well, that’s designed to give clients far greater confidence and comfort throughout that migration process,” he says. “We have projects in flight right now, which we will announce soon.”

Another key focal point for Itiviti is that of market data. SSEOMS, as a benefit of being part of the Bloomberg empire, came bundled with market data. Mackay says that his firm is market data agnostic, so clients will be able to feed in market data from various sources.

Because the market data came bundled into the SSEOMS offering, market data costs are contained.  As a result of Bloomberg’s planned exit of the unit, it might end up hitting current customers in the wallet, but Mackay does not think it will be prohibitive, either.

“Clients have a fairly clear expectation that replacement solutions are going to cost typically rather more than they were spending on Bloomberg SSEOMS,” Mackay says. “So, I think there’s a reasonable expectation of price upticks from the current spend, but we don’t think it’s anything too unreasonable.”

Looking Ahead

Mackay, who is fairly new to Itiviti, sees a broader trend across the market of a number of players either explicitly pulling out of this market like Bloomberg or, withdrawing investment from this market. 

“I think we’ve seen a number of years of consolidation of vendors into very large financial technology firms who are more focused on increasing their earnings by stripping out costs rather than by growing revenue. Typically, their solutions are characterized by legacy technology and they have few avenues left to achieve revenue growth, so they’re more focused on cutting costs,” he says.

He thinks Bloomberg has handled the situation admirably by being upfront and giving clear guidance to their customers that they will be terminating support in April 2021. 

“I don’t anticipate that there’ll be quite so much clear guidance from other competitors in the space, even though they are, you know, very much reducing their commitment to the space by making significant cutbacks in their teams,” he says.