Our client is one of the largest and most respected brokerage firms in North America. While their international customer base traditionally sought their services to trade in the Americas, it was their European Equity business that had grown significantly over the past three years. This placed greater pressure on their application support team to ensure service excellence across this expanding business area.
Our client’s application support team is tasked with supporting European clients trading in North America across Equities, as well as the native markets. The team is responsible for pre-market checks, validation and supporting order and execution flows, as well as monitoring multiple data streams for Europe and the US including Bloomberg®, Fidessa, Charles River and Ullink.
The large volumes of data handled and separate applications made it time consuming to manage and locate issues. The limited monitoring functionalities available were “event-based” making the team increasingly reactive to problems after they had occurred.
As noted by our client’s European Head of Production Services, “We are now looking a lot more at European trading and are focused on Electronic DMA flow. All of our order flow, to get to the market and our strategy trading engines, goes through our ULLINK platform. UL is not just our electronic trading platform for DMA, it takes all of our flow across all of equities.”
While ULLINK provides a hosted platform with its UL Dashboard, our client’s support team was only able to access limited information. The real benefit was getting to the valuable data produced, which is where Geneos helped. “You need real time insight into where you’re trading, what you’re trading, how you’re trading,” explains their European Head of Production Services.
Ultimately, our client wanted to achieve real-time visibility and access to the multiple streams of data gathered from across their equities trading platform, via one interface.
Geneos is the monitoring tool of choice across all of Equities globally, as well as Global Market Data, FX and Fixed Income.
Our client now has visibility of their ULLINK environment along with their other trading systems within one interface. No major issues have arisen in the 6 months since the Geneos and ULLINK solution has been implemented as the clear real-time view of information makes it easy to anticipate problems and act quickly when issues do occur, stopping issues from impacting the business and clients. Reassurance that everything is working correctly is probably even more important than just seeing when things go wrong, which our client has now.
The ITRS FIX plug-in generates alerts based on client login times so the team can check connectivity issues or inform brokers that their clients aren't trading in line with expectation. This has helped increase collaboration with the business by providing valuable information for them. For example, advising a broker if their client connections drop as they will need to take action to prevent or minimise market risk and exposure.
Increased customer service excellence as the support team is more efficient due to greater insight across the IT environment. They are now able to spot and act on issues and potential issues immediately and pass on these problems where appropriate. The support team now has more time to focus on strategising and implementing future enhancements to support continued business growth.
“ITRS Geneos was our chosen monitoring tool –if you’ve got one monitoring tool, you want that to be your monitoring tool,” commented the European Head of Production Services. “With Geneos you get a lot of out of the box monitoring, then you can also make use of the plug-ins to collect valuable data from your systems.”
