Both companies believe that the market is now witnessing the second wave of the electronic trading revolution where ease of deployment, scalability and the ability to offer differentiated customer service have become the essentials of doing business and winning. Moreover, increasing trading volumes and falling commissions mean that driving cost out of the middle office has now become an equally strong business imperative.
These changes will have a significant impact on the software industry and will create new categories of winners and losers. In these circumstances the directors of FFastFill and Future Dynamics believe that it is in the best interests of their clients and staff to be at the forefront of the consolidation created by these new market conditions.
By combining the respective strengths of the two companies’ front office offerings with Future Dynamics’ complementary middle office functionality and FFastFill’s unique managed service platform, the companies believe that they can offer a completely new approach to managing transaction flow that will bring better service and lower cost of ownership to all their customers.
Said Keith Todd, FFastFill’s Executive Chairman, “It has been clear to us for some time that the needs of our customers would require a consolidation of the suppliers to this sector. Having built our industrial strength application service for the trading front office, we have been exploring how we might extend this to cover the whole of the order flow, and allow us to expand our penetration both in the UK and US markets. Future Dynamics provides us with the complementary capabilities in the middle office through its presence in London and Chicago plus an additional twenty-eight customers. Together we will now be able to offer a unique managed order flow service to firms trading the derivatives markets across the world.”
Steve Grob, Chief Executive of Future Dynamics said “Having developed such a strong middle office capability, we have been looking for a partner who could provide us with a service platform on which we could deliver it. I am delighted that, in FFastFill, we have found a partner who has such a strong service offering. Together I believe we can add significant value to all our respective customers.”
Future Dynamics is a software company focused on the derivatives markets. Founded initially in 1992 as a database consultancy company, Future Dynamics was established in its current form in 1999 focused primarily on the middle office requirements of the medium and large-scale brokerages and investment banks.
The company has built a strong software platform for its products based on a workflow approach. This offers a far more flexible, consistent and cost-effective approach to providing integrated solutions than traditional software products.
Future Dynamics has a significant customer base both in London and Chicago, the world’s two largest markets for derivative trading. It has also built a reputation for customised services to meet the particular requirements of its clients.
FFastFill last month re-launched itself as an Application Services provider, offering a unique industrial strength, managed service that provides full accountability for delivering the complete trading technology platform by contracting to a Service Level Agreement (SLA) which reflects the customers business requirement, at a single fee which covers all aspects of the service.
The service is of extremely high quality because FFastFill has re-engineered the way in which all elements of the trading technology have been designed and implemented from the network through to the application. Most importantly the application software has been re-architected to provide a modular and flexible solution that provides not only high levels of performance and security, but also totally new benchmarks for availability, configurability and scalability.
In order to support such a high quality service, FFastFill manages the whole operation using a comprehensive service management system which monitors and controls all aspects of the delivered service including not only the performance and availability of the network and the IT infrastructure but also the application software.
Commercially, therefore, intermediaries can now take of advantage of scaleable IT services according to their customer and exchange needs without the cost of self-build and maintenance. This enables brokers to expand into new customer areas more profitably as the high fixed IT hurdle costs cease to be barriers to entry into new e-trading sectors.
By bringing FFastFill and Future Dynamics together, the new combination will be able to provide a high quality service offering across the whole of the front and middle office, from a single supplier that has the necessary management expertise, professional engineering and knowledge of the complete trading process.
