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By Nicholas Pratt
have to keep investing in the background elements – the trading infrastructure, the capacity to process tickets and a whole range of activities that are not observable to clients but essential to their experience.”
In terms of innovation you have to seek, but not always succeed, to deliver something new that satisfies clients’ expressed desires but also what is unexpressed in order to be truly innovative, says Robertson. “It can be difficult to separate being client-focused from being product-focused. Of course you have to spend time finding out what the clients are looking for but to be innovative you have to offer something different which may not necessarily be what clients are asking for.” He cites examples of where he thinks BARX has been innovative in the FX e-commerce market over the last decade – such as offering trading via FIX, placing an extra decimal place on spot pricing, algorithmically generating and risk managing spot pricing and streaming exotics.
BARX uses technology developed wholly in- house, a decision that was initially tactical but has become strategic, says Robertson. “We view this as a differentiator and the intellectual property is
important not just for price formation and risk management but also for the user interface. We feel that it is important to be able to devise and control as much of the client experience as possible and I don’t think this has been the case for all of the providers in the market that rely on vendors’ software.”
Customisation
Te nature of clients’ business also dictates the kind of customisation and personalisation that a platform provides, says Robertson. “Tere are two elements to the customisation. Te first is at the administration level in terms of the permissions and constraints for users and other control functions. Te second element is greater client customisation, for example to decide how their blotters will look or what format they want trade notifications to be sent to them. Te demands vary but the technology has become more flexible and allows us to add more elements and do more interesting things.”
One of the areas of development for e-commerce services has been the provision of pre-trade services and, more specifically, the content involved - from pure FX research to the more proprietary and
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