OTAS Builds App to Embed Analytics in Symphony Chat, Eyes More Partners for 2016

The new application will be available via Symphony's app store-style portal, Symphony Marketplace, which is scheduled to launch in the second quarter of this year. OTAS plans to make as much of its content available as possible via the application, so that users can enrich their chat with its analytics.

"A lot of the chats that take place are internal discussions about investment topics. By embedding our content into the chat, users can pull in relevant OTAS analytics, content, images, text and charts into the discussion and have it recorded for prosperity. Then the recording of those chats can be retrieved and analyzed to produce deeper and better investment decision making," says OTAS chief executive Tom Doris.

Symphony's customer base will likely include many of the same firms that OTAS already counts among its customer base, Doris says. However, there is a possibility that the vendor will also be able to reach users in different job functions. "The nature of the Symphony rollout is that it is all or nothing, rather than an EMS (execution management system) rollout that only touches a selection of users. We are quite excited to see how broad our reach can go," he adds.

OTAS decided to partner with Symphony in anticipation of 2016 being the "year of the ecosystem." At the end of last year, OTAS partnered with a range of vendors─including online institutional research marketplace RSRCHXchange, and trading technology vendors Portware and Fidessa─to embed its analytics into their execution and order management systems, and has five more partnerships in the pipeline, Doris says.

In the past, vendors operated closed trading applications and data terminals, whereby if a client went to one vendor but wanted analytics, news sentiment or anything else from another, it was difficult to add the content in a timely and cost-effective manner, Doris says. Now, vendors such as Fidessa, Thomson Reuters and Portware have committed to opening up their platforms to provide an ecosystem of content to customers.

Doris says that some firms who have tasked heads of trading desks with designing the next-generation trading platform are pushing vendors to create ecosystems to enable them to consume the data and analytics they want without being tied into a single platform.

"They are thinking more creatively about how to improve their workflow and empower the traders to demand what they will find useful. It will mean there will be more complicated issues around keeping workflows consolidated, compliance and regulation, but they are technology problems that are being solved. This year, people will realize they need─and can have─something more sophisticated than regurgitated market data from exchanges. They can have more interesting and useful analysis of that data," he adds.