Fidessa EMS Bows in Asia Markets

NEW YORK—Fidessa last week continued the global rollout of its execution management workstation (EMS) by expanding into Asia.

Fidessa, which is part of Royalblue, unveiled the EMS solution in June 2005 for Europe and during the Securities Industry Association's (SIA) annual technology conference this year in New York for the U.S. market, says Simon Barnby, global director of marketing and communication for Fidessa.

The offering is intended to be a global, broker-neutral, multi-asset platform. Fidessa is looking to appeal to the buy side with this latest release, Barnby says. But "because a lot of sell-sides now also want to work with their clients for full coverage … a lot of the features that we're putting into the buy-side product end up being [used] as a sell-side product too," he says.

The EMS "provides a buy-side trading desk with tools they need to trade the markets through the broker that we have on our network," Barnby says. "We have over 170 brokers on our network and it provides them with the tools they need to trade either DMAs directly on the market or algorithmically."

Since the European launch, Fidessa has added order management tools, basket management and derivatives capabilities, Barnby says. "We've also extended the coverage in terms of the markets we cover."

Adding these capabilities over the past 12 to 16 months has now made the EMS "relevant to the Asian market [and] is the reason we're launching in Asia today," he says.

The differences between the Asian, U.S. and European markets are nuanced, but there are things like the way data is displayed that requires Fidessa to "tweak" certain things, Barnby says. "We have to build in … features and requirements of the market" to account for these "regional variants," he says.

At this point, Fidessa has approximately 90 clients using the EMS in Europe, with 19 of those being hedge funds, Barnby says. The company has a team actively promoting the offering, Barnby says, so he expects that "that number will grow quite rapidly."

Calyon Financial last month went live as a derivatives market access provider on Fidessa's EMS. It will be connecting to Fidessa via the Financial Information eXchange (FIX) protocol (DWT, Oct. 23). ADM Investor Services International Ltd. also announced that it would switch to the Fidessa hosted trading platform for equities and derivatives operations (DWT, Oct. 30).

Earlier this month, officials from the new Mifid-compliant exchange Equiduct said they are hoping to sign deals with Fidessa, SunGard and GL Trade to provide multiple exchange connectivity to securities firms (DWT, Nov. 6).