Bridge And MacGregor Exchange Indications, FIX Software Opens Up Market

NEW YORK--Bridge Information Systems and The MacGregor Group are putting the finishing touches on an interface between Bridge's EasyFIX order-routing application and Triad order-entry system and MacGregor's FIX Network that will permit institutional and sell-side users of both systems to receive indications of interest from more than 100 North American brokers. The agreement is the first of several that Bridge and MacGregor are negotiating with other vendors, and it is another clear sign that software vendors are using the Financial Information Exchange, or FIX, protocol to open up services that had been dominated by proprietary technologies.

For example, Bridge is one of the leading vendors in the indications of interest, or IOI, niche, and it and its chief rival, Thomson Financial Services' Autex group, have been steadily migrating toward opening up their services to FIX compliance.

In the last year, Autex completed a TCP/IP connection to the 450 institutions and 275 broker dealers using its service, says David Leone, vice president for sales and marketing. This enables any of the institutions to receive FIX compliant IOIs.

Last year, Bridge lured Bob Lamoureux, who had pioneered FIX while at Fidelity Investments, to develop EasyFIX.

The product went live in January, and is transmitting roughly 20,000 to 50,000 messages a day, says David Quinlan, a senior vice president with Bridge.

The interface between Bridge and MacGregor is the result of an agreement the two companies reached last year, and final testing and early client installations are scheduled to proceed through the next six weeks.

"Once the circuits are in place, we should be pretty comfortable moving messages three weeks after that," Quinlan says. "We should be able to fly pretty quickly."

"We've both standardized on FIX, and we're both on the same page," says a MacGregor spokeswoman. "So completing the interface has been a relatively straightforward process."

The interface will contact some 20 broker clients of MacGregor's FIX Network, or MFN, 60 brokers linked to Bridge's EasyFIX network and another 20 that use Bridge's Triad order indication system. There are 23 institutional users of MacGregor's Predator buy-side trade order management software, and 10 of them are also linked to MFN.

The remaining 13 Predator users can receive IOIs through this interface provided they sign up for a link to MFN, says the MacGregor spokeswoman.

EasyFIX is a front-end application Bridge developed for FIX-compliant messaging, Quinlan says. The program resides inside a standard browser such as Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer. It's priced at $300 per user per month plus a connectivity fee of $95 for each connection to a broker.

Triad has been available for close to 18 months and costs brokers $2,500 per month for a one- to three-user system.

The first stage of the interface will only cover brokers in North America, but a MacGregor spokeswoman says there are long-range plans to cover brokers and institutions in Europe, Asia and other international markets.