OptionsCity's CEO Discusses Optionshop Acquisition

Hazem Dawani, chief executive at OptionsCity, spoke with Buy-Side Technology about the acquisition and how the electronic trading solutions vendor plans to integrate Optionshop's suite of product, which includes cloud-based APIs, mobile trading products and HTML5 functionality.

Buy-Side Technology: How did this acquisition come about? Did you already have a relationship with Optionshop?
Hazem Dawani: OptionsCity had a pre-existing relationship with Optionshop. OptionsCity was one of the founding partners of the company in late 2010, and it continued to own a non-controlling stake in the company. We also licensed some of our backend technology to help build the Optionshop platform.

BST: Did you have cloud capabilities prior to Optionshop? How do you plan to employ their cloud products into your own offering?
Dawani: We did not have cloud capabilities prior to Optionshop. We plan to continue running the Optionshop platform as a separate product line. Also, we will take Optionshop's innovative technology and start integrating it into future generations of the OptionsCity platform.

BST: How will Optionshop's mobile capabilities help you to enhance the OptionsCity offering?
Dawani: We are integrating some of Optionshop's technologies into our existing products and evolving into a more service oriented architecture (SOA). We also plan to introduce a mobile solution for our customers using some of the existing Optionshop tools and products.

BST: Will you be keeping Optionshop's employees on staff?
Dawani: Yes, we are keeping all of the Optionshop staff and they are becoming part of the OptionsCity team.

BST: How long do you anticipate the integration of their technologies into the OptionsCity offering to take?
Dawani: Our existing customers will start seeing the benefits of this integration in the next six to 12 months.