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According to Bell, who spoke to WSL about the closed-to-the-media event, firms shared they are increasingly looking towards these partnerships to help leap over technology hurdles. He noted cooperation is considered the only way to combat dropping revenues, rising costs and external security threats. With many of the core services commoditized, it’s less a question of buy versus build, and more about who can help who, he added. “Firms are more open to finding quality aggregators of data and quality infrastructure players,” Bell said, adding that it’s about “finding the best partners to work with”. Because firms have different specialties, he noted JEFF BELL it makes sense for Brokerage the industry to move towards the “X-as-a-service” model. As examples, he cited risk-asa-service, infrastructure-as-a-service, and the long available software-as-aservice. Looking at risk management, firms agreed that value is created in the way information is put together, and through proprietary calculations and analytics, than based on the information presented, Bell said. TRADING FIRMS
POSIT’s expansion into another southern Asia market (WSL Online 3/11/13). The connection to SGX will go live in mid-April, Selway said. It will be the third Asian market ITG has added in the last two quarters. The firm will have to tweak the platform to accommodate the SGX rule requiring minimum trade sizes for off-exchange trading, Selway explained. Additionally, the firm will need to choose a local clearing partner, he added. Separately, ITG also announced what Selway called a “major” upgrade to its POSIT Alert platform, the first since its 2006 launch, that gives the platform a facelift by adding enhanced customization capabilities for blotter sweeps, hot buttons to streamline workflow and infrastructure improvements. “It’s much more robust than the prior software,” Selway said. The updated blotter sweeping functionality will search traders’
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blotters for similar trades to allow them to find new trading opportunities, Selway said. A rules toolkit also allows traders to instruct the system to sweep other blotters for orders of a certain size or in a specific sector, he added. Hot buttons were added to JAMIE SELWAY managing director automate specific functions, such as handling of certain orders. Giving the example of a 50,000 share trade that is partially filled in the dark pool up to 47,000 shares, Selway said a button can now be created to generate an order for the remaining 3,000 shares and push it out to the market to be filled. Further enhancements include the ability to seamlessly push updates out to clients, an improvement over manual updates ITG made on client workstations using compact disks, Selway said. Also, separate systems used to access Asia, Europe and North American trading venues are now accessible via one piece of software,