Waters Rankings 2019 Winner's Interview: Genesis Global Technology

In what was one of the biggest surprises of this year’s Waters Rankings, Genesis Global Technology won the best cloud infrastructure provider category, thanks to its Application Acceleration Framework. Victor Anderson speaks to Genesis’ CEO, Stephen Murphy, about the firm’s value proposition for its capital markets clients, what their greatest pain points are right now, and what’s on the horizon for the New York and London-based cloud specialist in terms of new services and functionality.      

WatersTechnology: Genesis is a relative minnow compared to the bulge-bracket providers in what is now a highly competitive market. What does Genesis do and how does it manage to compete with the likes of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform?   

Stephen Murphy, CEO, Genesis Global Technology: What we do is leverage these infrastructure providers and combine them with our Microservices-based framework, business component library and tools to provide unprecedented time to market for solutions. This makes the cloud part of an overall solution relevant for the capital markets space and not just a pure infrastructure initiative. A good example of the tooling is GEM, or Genesis Environment Manager, a tool that is agnostic to the underlying cloud providers, featuring cloud management from the point of starting a new development environment through to going live in production and continuous integration of future releases. These cloud infrastructure providers are only one piece of a puzzle—they need to be relevant and part of solving our clients’ needs.

WatersTechnology: In terms of cloud-based services, what are Genesis’ clients most looking for right now, and what problems is Genesis solving for its capital markets clients?

Murphy: Our clients are looking for us to provide our technology and tools to help them transition from legacy technologies—both in-house-developed and from third-party technology vendors—to a Microservices-based technology stack, and in doing so transition to the cloud in one step. Our clients come to us because we solve the paradigm of not “build vs. buy” but “build and buy.” Clients use our framework and tooling where they can develop a solution just for themselves on our state-of-the-art technology platform. They can also partner with us to build a new product for the market and leverage our growing suite of products, which spans the capital markets, including the wealth management and asset management sectors.

WatersTechnology: Typically, what applications and functionality for specific business processes are Genesis’ clients looking to build in the cloud, and how is that environment preferable for application development compared with traditional models?   

Murphy: It is probably easier to say what clients are not asking us to build in the cloud. These include highly latency-sensitive solutions that need to be as close to market data as possible and matching engine-type technology. Apart from that, everything is open to be on either the public cloud or on the client’s private cloud. Very few use-cases are that latency-sensitive compared to the broad spectrum of use-cases across our clients’ domains, from treasury desks through to asset management firms. Ultimately, our clients want and continuously expect time to market and agility. We provide that end-to-end, from the moment we start discussing a solution with our clients through to production releases. Imagine that in client meetings we can start to initiate an environment and build a solution right in front of them in a no-code and low-code manner, all of which is running on a state-of-the-art, Microservices-based technology framework.

WatersTechnology: What’s on the immediate horizon for Genesis in terms of technology/functionality/services? What is the firm working on right now that WatersTechnology’s readers need to know about?    

Murphy: We are currently focused on the tooling we provide around our framework, business component library, and solutions. We have tools we have developed and offer to our clients such as Creative Studio, which allows developers to build no-code and low-code web user interface solutions. Our GEM tool is another example of how we can help simplify the use of cloud infrastructure from starting development through to maintaining a mission-critical product solution. GEM is agnostic to the underlying cloud infrastructure provider. Where you will see us invest more and more is in these tools, which allow us and our clients to rethink how solutions are built, typically within hours. We have already drastically reduced time to market for application development, but we want to decrease this even further. We call this our “Microservices Platform-as-a-Service” strategy, which has been built specifically to cater to the complex needs of capital markets firms, where performance, scalability, security and resilience are critical.

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