Miller Tabak Deal Marks More SaaS Success for Fidessa

Miller Tabak's equity orders, trades and positions management, and market access will be consolidated onto a single Fidessa platform, with additional client allocations and confirmations tracking in the middle office.

Additionally, the broker will now be connected to Fidessa's community of market data providers and suite of advanced trading tools, including Bluebox, an algorithmic trading engine, as well as pairs and global basket trading capabilities.

“Our biggest challenge was to find a way to consolidate our disparate systems and standardize on one single solution. We were able to see immediate benefits from having a seamlessly integrated platform, especially in the form of cost savings and increased efficiencies, which we have passed along to our clients through aggressive and imaginative trading strategies," says Brian Byrne, managing director at Miller Tabak.

The deal is only the latest broker implementation success for Fidessa, which has now completed over 100 of them in the U.S., alone. David Polen, Fidessa's head of business development, says the firm has rapidly developed an expertise in the space by evolving an additional Software-as-a-service (SaaS) model that prioritizes time to market, to pair with the more methodical enterprise implementations it began with, and indeed still offers.

"Often, we're working with a firm faced with expiring contracts with other vendors, looking at revenue recognition, or even small start-ups where they simply can't make money before implementation. So we aim to measure delivery in weeks." That process is made possible by "asking the right questions," says Polen, and better translating brokers' unique requirements into solutions. Often, as was the case with Miller Tabak, Fidessa dedicates a business analyst to such projects to document clients' individual needs.

The experience of doing this more than 100 times has really benefited our ability to combine effective functionality with a genuine understanding of what clients need, and to get things right on their first iteration. - David Polen

That preparation particularly bears fruit when firms are looking to replace disparate systems and then integrate across a single platform, reducing overlaps and duplication for which they had previously paid a premium.

For a specialist broker like Miller Tabak, Polen says human-intensive and OTC workload, like "pink sheet trading" in non-exchange listed equities, is greatly improved by having every trading function on a single screen, avoiding "swivel issues." Other benefits include having indications of interest (IOIs) integrated directly into a broker's OMS, which reduces the cost of fetching data subsets, and streamlined connectivity management when a buy-side client wants to amend its total expense or commission field parameters.

What all this has in common, though, and why Fidessa's roll with brokers is set to continue, is confidence in the notion that something done faster can still be done right.

"The experience of doing this more than 100 times has really benefited our ability to combine effective functionality with a genuine understanding of what clients need, and to get things right on their first iteration," Polen concludes, explaining that the key to designing an effective implementation, and a successful business case, is being proactive.