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Other Providers
In addition to the nine profiled providers an additional
thirteen firms received at least one response. There
were also a number of respondents who use their
own proprietary capabilities, whether for a single
asset class such as FX or more broadly. In a number of
cases the level of responses received grew from 2016
levels, reflecting the growth in overall responses to the
Survey. Among systems delivered by brokers to clients,
those of Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan and UBS achieved
the highest number of responses. Within other groups
EZE Software, Fidessa, InfoReach and ULLINK saw
the greatest market penetration and would certainly
consider themselves capable of challenging other
independent firms in the future. As might be expected
the broker platforms like Passport and Pinpoint had
a response base dominated by hedge funds, though
responses also included other agency only brokers
using their systems. Among the non-broker systems,
the client base was more varied, with Fidessa seeing a
large number of responses from sell-side firms. Each
of these firms has a core strength, whether by type
of client, size or geography. That is a source of their
continuing business success, and at the present time
seems to be strong enough to maintain a measure of
independence. However it also makes it difficult to
compare scores, whether across the Survey as a whole
or in the context of more broadly based competitors.
In terms of scores the results among these dif-
ferent providers was varied and generally, though
not always, lower than the levels achieved by the
firms that were profiled. UBS Pinpoint for example
scored comfortably ahead of the Survey averages in
more than half of the thirteen categories. However
unsurprisingly it did less well in areas such as broker
and direct exchange connections as well as product
development and integration with clients’ internal
systems. The latter are always a challenge for nar-
rowly based providers and those focused on routing
orders to a specific broker. Morgan Stanley scores
followed a similar profile but with generally weaker
performance, while JP Morgan Neovest was between
these two extremes in terms of scores. Within the
group of independent providers, InfoReach certainly
achieved the best scores, beating the Survey average
consistently and seeing excellent performance in
client service, but doing less well in terms of cost.
Fidessa, with a large and demanding client base, saw
the weakest scores within this set of providers, and
should perhaps be concerned about scores for client
service as well as the timeliness of updates to the
system.
Overall while further consolidation within the EMS
world seems likely there are no obvious acquisition
candidates based on performance within the survey.
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