[ I N T E R V I E W
That's the landscape, which is
very different from a number of
years ago. The landscape is domi-
nated by a limited number of very
large firms that aren't innovating
and acting like gatekeepers, focused
on stripping out costs.
Itiviti sits in the middle; we are
a mid-sized firm with just under
1,000 staff operating out of 18 offic-
es, we have relationships in place
with 1,600 financial organisations
globally. That gives us a really in-
teresting opportunity to work with
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M A C K AY ]
the existing Bloomberg organisa-
tion.
We have spoken to all of the SSE-
OMS customers, we have already
onboarded a few of these and there
are further announcements on
this in the pipeline. We have a very
healthy pipeline of deals that we
expect to close running through the
middle of next year.
Specifically to the partnership
with Bloomberg, a key part of this
is that we want to ensure that as
many of the Bloomberg services
“The landscape is dominated by a limited number of very
large firms that aren't innovating and acting like gatekeepers,
focused on stripping out costs.”
the far smaller, innovative firms
and use our scale and relationships
to help them get to market. I expect
to see consolidation from the big
firms because stripping out cost is a
scale game and I see the innovation
coming from small-to-mid-sized
firms. At Itiviti we are investing
in our platform but we are also
very actively working with much
smaller firms to help promote their
technology and take it to market.
innovation. But importantly, they
almost act as gatekeepers because
they have existing relationships
with the vast majority of financial
markets participants.
Then, at the bottom, there are a
lot of firms that innovate, which
have exciting technology, maybe
founder-led, are usually smaller
organisations and almost certainly
don't have scale or the relationships
with the financial markets partic-
ipants. Importantly, they can be
difficult to work with, particularly
for large financial organisations,
because procurement departments
and banks and insurers make it very
hard to work with firms of this size.
Can you share some details on the
project with Bloomberg to migrate
clients from its SSEOMS platform?
RM: Itiviti has been fortunate to
pick up quite a number of talented
members of the SSEOMS team. A
few of these we have already an-
nounced to the market, such as our
new chief product officer, Linda
Middleditch, while quite a number
of them have not been announced,
but we have brought onboard a
pretty strong team that came from
Bloomberg and typically from tier
one investment banks before that.
That team has been critical to
maintaining the relationships with
that their customers are using at
the moment are uninterrupted. The
last piece of this is around onboard-
ing, where we work closely with
the Bloomberg team to ensure there
is as little disruption as possible and
that the process goes as smoothly
as possible.
What is primary focus for Itiviti over
the coming 18 months?
RM: There is a rather unusu-
al situation that is created by
Bloomberg explicitly pulling back
from the market and by ION Group
cutting so much cost of the Fidessa
business, and other large legacy
providers in this space; that creates
the opportunity for us. We are
focused on that space for now and
that is going to drive very substan-
tial growth for us.
Clearly the second half of this
year we have good visibility and
into next year, there is a healthy
pipeline of projects and given the
scale of disruption it's realistic to
assume the growth of that side of
the business going on for a good
number of years into the future.
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