A year has passed since roughly a quarter of Fidessa’s global workforce left the 40-year-old tech company, following the 2018 takeover by trading technology conglomerate Ion Group. Now, some former employees are again working with the equities and derivatives order management system (OMS) provider from the outside by proxy.

Since resigning last year following the $1.9 billion takeover by Ion, Steve Grob, former director of group strategy at Fidessa and former Ion chief marketing officer, founded his own consultancy for fintechs in the capital markets called Vision57. And Mitchell Robertson, a former product manager at Fidessa, has settled in at another consulting startup, Leading Point Financial Markets, as a derivatives specialist. Where the two intersect these days, coincidentally, is in their work at the crossroads of old and new: OMS technology and interoperability.

Much of the interop movement has centered on building tools that allow web-based or browser-based applications to integrate and talk to one another. Reaching that same level of interoperability between applications written in C++, Java or .NET—namely, monolithic platforms like order and execution management systems, and terminals—is the next frontier for this movement as trading firms hunt for the ability to pluck their preferred software components from cutting-edge fintechs, and stitch them together with their preferred trading platforms.

One step for Robertson, who joined Leading Point in January, began by creating a business division within the company that will specifically cater to Fidessa users by providing outsourced front-line support, now called Outsourced Production Support (OPS). As Fidessa’s employee attrition rate ramped up post-acquisition, he spotted an opportunity.

“The gap we want to fill is the floorwalker—you know, the things that can be resolved onsite. And I think people miss the personal interaction, as well,” says Robertson, who was working on an online help tool for clients prior to his departure from Fidessa. “They want somebody, sometimes, just to say you’re doing that right, or you could do that in a different way.”

Since taking the idea to Leading Point, OPS now looks beyond delivery and support to include change, cost, and risk management.

“When I talk about risk management and a cost-managed approach, it’s about giving clients the opportunity to pick and choose what their support, change management or the implementation needs to look like,” says Dishang Patel, head of fintech and alternative financial institutions at Leading Point.

The second step is Leading Point’s budding relationship with Glue42, a desktop application interoperability vendor that is working closely with Ion to extend the life of the trading platform by building new apps and open APIs to allow clients to integrate Fidessa into their fintech ecosystems, says a source who currently works at Fidessa.

Robertson expects Glue42’s features will invite more brokers onto Fidessa and satisfy existing ones who want to reduce the amount of hardware on their desks.

He gives an example in which a trader pulls up a stock portfolio on their screen. Near it is an options matrix, some charts, maybe a pricing model, all inside the Fidessa platform. Clicking on an instrument within the portfolio updates those other tools through Fidessa’s tracking facility, but the capability doesn’t extend to apps outside the platform. Glue42 joins the applications at the data and user-interface levels, so that in the Glue42 application, all applications—for example, Fidessa, Bloomberg, Salesforce, and Microsoft Excel documents—track together in the same fashion as Fidessa’s built-in tracking facility.

“We try to talk about it as just creating desktops,” Robertson says. “So we stop thinking about different apps, and we just start thinking about a desktop that is composed of the best parts of other applications.”

A Growing Market

The Glue42 draw for Leading Point is not Fidessa-specific, nor is it for Grob, who is also working with Glue42; they are after something bigger. The aim is to work with Fidessa and other legacy trading providers to help these companies to reinvent themselves.

The pair, whose businesses and projects are not affiliated with each other, are both looking to jump into the next chapter of capital markets interop—which, Grob says, is even more pressing now that the coronavirus pandemic has forced traders into remote work, meaning they most likely have drastically less screen real estate at their disposal.

“There is a real sense that when people do go back to [their] offices, they won’t go back in the same way. So technology that talks to distributed workforces—connecting people, connecting different applications—is actually finding itself in a pretty good place” at the moment, he says.

Glue42 has been contracting Grob for the last two months to work on projects specifically related to OMSs.

Grob, whose startup works with several companies beyond the realm of the OMS—including Velox and Rapid Addition, which both focus on low-latency electronic trading tech, and Big XYT, a data analytics and visualization startup—says when it comes to weighty OMS platforms, such as those offered by Fidessa, FIS, and Itiviti, there is always the conversation at banks of whether to build or buy.

“What’s changing now is firms are saying, ‘Actually I don’t really want to do that. What I want to do is build and buy,’” Grob says. “‘I want to assemble this as a foundational component, which means that I can get lower costs and get vendors to do the heavy lifting, and at the same time, be easily able to add, through APIs, my own intellectual property, whether it’s my quant stuff, my algos, my data analytics, [and] what have you.’”

The Bigger Picture

James Wooster, CEO of Glue42, says Fidessa and Ion have been “fantastically supportive” of the company’s work. How that relationship came about was the product of sheer luck, he says.

In May, it was announced that Redburn, a European provider of equity research and agency execution, implemented Glue42 to more efficiently ride the wave of market volatility that the coronavirus pandemic had spurred.

“Glue42 Enterprise enables execution firms to connect Fidessa, Bloomberg, [software vendor] Genesis, and existing in-house applications to allow its execution team to respond more quickly while following best execution practices from home,” said a release by the interop vendor.

That’s when Glue42 started talking to Fidessa and Bloomberg, for which the company already had connectors through APIs, about how those could play into its ability to integrate platforms that contain applications written in older or mixed programming languages.

“What we realized is that we could approach many Fidessa clients, or indeed Bloomberg clients, and say, ‘Well, if you’ve got one, would you like the other integrated?’” Wooster says.

While the financial services community often talks about the need to overhaul legacy systems, Wooster says that is oversimplified—it’s possible, he says, to give some legacy apps a new lease on life. That’s why he’s not out to give users of such staple products alternative solutions. First, firms need to agree on what their legacy systems are; from there, they should decide which ones need outright replacement, and which ones need more of a makeover.

JP Morgan is one such user of Glue42. As part of its digital transformation agenda, the bank needed to replace its entire set of user applications. The goal was to build an application collaboration environment that could link together internal and external applications built in different technologies. To achieve this, they developed a new API platform, built using Glue42 Enterprise, according to one of the vendor’s published case studies.

Freddy Tenaglia, managing director at JP Morgan, said the rationale was to migrate from legacy systems to using interoperable, agnostic micro-applications.

“If your reason for getting rid of [legacy apps] was you couldn’t integrate with them, well, that problem’s solved,” Wooster says.

Jon Butler, CEO of Velox and former Goldman Sachs managing director, is another who is eager to see technologies such as interop and low-code apps transform institutional banks.

“The fundamental issue with capital markets over the last 20 years, from a technology perspective, is that it’s been one thing after another that requires a massive amount of adaptation to continue to be efficient,” Butler says, pointing to the 2008 financial crisis, the European credit crisis, Y2K, the Dodd–Frank Act and the Covid-19 pandemic. “Banks have been stuck in all this legacy stuff, they’ve got all this third-party stuff—they can’t deal with these things properly because they can’t adapt—and they can’t innovate. They can’t make the changes, and so they end up with people trying to plug the gaps.”

So the idea of being able to take tens or hundreds of existing apps and operate them under one roof, Butler says, makes those banks much more efficient and much faster than they would be if they built and bought new services year after year. He echoes Grob in saying that the Covid-19 pandemic, which may not be the last of its kind of crisis in our lifetimes, will push this idea further.

“I would say that coronavirus could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back,” he says.