[ T R A D E T E C H
F X
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BUY-SIDE LOOKING FOR FLEXIBILITY AS
TOP TECHNOLOGY REQUIREMENT
BUY-SIDE PANELLISTS HIGHLIGHT IMPORTANCE OF WORKING WITH FORWARD-
LOOKING TECHNOLOGY VENDORS AND WARN THOSE THAT DO NOT TAKE A
PRO-ACTIVE APPROACH.
B
uy-side panellists have iden-
tified flexibility as their key
requirement from both technology
systems and vendors to maintain ment necessitates a good deal of
flexibility from its partnerships
with technology vendors.
“We’re thinking of a vendor asking for it. By the time you get to
that 90th percentile, it’s probably
something everyone needed three
years ago,” O’Brien said.
high workflow standards and to
increase automation.
Mike O’Brien, head of global
trading at Eaton Vance, detailed
that the key drivers for the asset
manager’s recent investments in
technology have been automation
and efficiencies, at least as a start-
ing point, and that this require- partnership where the vendor is
forward-looking, so that they don’t
need to wait until 80-90% of their
clients to ask for something before
they do it. Market structure or the
way things trade can change very
quickly, and if I am asking for it
there’s a pretty good chance a lot
of other people are going to be “There are definitely specific ven-
dors in FX that won’t exist in their
current form several years down
the line, because they are not very
forward-looking or adapting to the
way FX is changing. Those that are
making decisions today about what
things will look like, even if those
calls are wrong, the fact that they
24 // TheTrade // Spring 2019