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Rob Mackay, who took on the role of CEO at Itiviti in April, talks to The TRADE about
last year's merger with Ullink, the firm's ongoing work with Bloomberg, and why the
enterprise vendor space is failing on legacy technology.
How have the initial months at the
helm of Itiviti been for you and
what have been your first priorities?
Rob Mackay: It is a pretty exciting
time to join the firm; Itiviti has
a great set of products and is a
healthy, growing business. His-
torically Itiviti has been a slightly
quiet company and probably hasn't
marketed itself quite as much as it
could have done, and so the poten-
tial of the firm is pretty significant.
It's an exciting time to join
because all our businesses are
growing well and we see potential
for considerable further growth
in our businesses. On the agency
trading side, there is considerable
disruption from competitors pull-
ing back from that market, which
creates enormous opportunities.
On the principal trading side where
we have the newest generation
of multi-asset class, low-latency
infrastructure, there's a lot of
appetite from banks and trading
firms to adopt that infrastructure,
because it is the newest technology
on the market. We have also been
investing in the NYFIX order-rout-
ing network.
We have been investing in all of
our products, which, in general, is
different to most of our competi-
tors, many of which are now legacy,
and that investment pays off well.
We see this with the order-routing
network and its associated services,
where we have seen great channel
growth and our post-trade services
- the trade matching for buy-side
firms - is also seeing growth. It's
the same with our connectivity
portfolio; the fact that we are in-
vesting when generally most other
firms in this space are pulling back
from the market, is paying off well
for us.
How has the merger between Itiviti
and ULLINK enhanced the business
and its offering since its comple-
tion?
RM: Broadly speaking, ULLINK
brought the agency trading
business, the NYFIX network,
it's connectivity portfolio and a
very strong presence in Conti-
nental Europe. Itiviti brought the
principal trading stack, the Tbricks
technology, and its FIX engines and
connectivity hubs.
The first thing you get bring-
ing these two together is a very
dominant position in connectivity.
Secondly you have a very compli-
mentary technology stack in both
agency and principal trading, and
clearly the opportunity on the back
of that is to integrate our combined
services. We've made good progress
there and will have announcements
later this year on that.
One of the other areas of invest-
ment has been developing our
managed FIX services, where we
have seen good adoption from cus-
tomers, and leveraging the NYFIX
network we have been seeing a
significant amount of growth in our
NYFIX matching business, where
we offer trade matching services -
essentially equivalent to firms like
Omgeo, Traiana or Markit - that
has significantly reduced prices.
What are the major issues your
clients are facing and how is Itiviti
helping to address these?
RM: One of the big concerns we are
planning for is that our customers
are dealing with legacy technology.
The way the financial technology
business looks has changed dra-
matically; historically there were
lots of mid-sized firms (around
50-500 million dollar revenues)
but these have all been snapped
up by the financial technology
giants with multi-billion dollars of
revenue.
Typically what we see with these
very large financial technology
firms is that they have a portfolio
of legacy assets because they have
bought mature revenue streams
in the past and those streams are
associated with already legacy
technology. So they are constantly
dealing with declining revenue and
they are not focused on innovation
at all. What they are doing is strip-
ping out cost and we have seen this
with a number of firms.
We see it with Bloomberg looking
to exit some of their unprofitable
business, like KYC or SSEOMS. We
see it with Fidessa and the rather
dramatic news that ION Group is
stripping out enormous amounts of
cost from the Fidessa business. We
see it with FIS and their acquisition
of Sungard, where they announced
“We have been investing in all of our products,
which, in general, is different to most of our
competitors, many of which are now legacy.”
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