Lab49, the specialist technology consultancy owned by ION Group, has partnered with interop.io, the interoperability provider formed when Glue42 and Finsemble merged last year, to provides buy and sell-side firms with comprehensive access to interop.io’s suite of solutions together with bespoke professional services from Lab49. Together, the two companies aim to modernise the trading desktop experience by refining operational workflows, enhancing trading efficiency, and aiding in digital transformation.
“We’ve all seen the adoption of interoperability grow in the past few years, and our technology has been a big part of that,” interop.io’s President and Co-founder Dan Schleifer tells TradingTech Insight. “But the implementation and deployment work is something that can take a bit of time, not because the technology is difficult but because it represents change inside an organisation. So a lot of our clients lean on professional services from consulting firms such as Lab 49 to help them think through the workflows that they want to optimise using interoperability. What are the systems they want to connect? How do they map out user journeys? How do they think about integrating AI into their interoperability platform? Partnerships like this are key to our customers being successful with interoperability.”Clients already benefitting from the partnership include an institutional broker-dealer that has automated multiple steps of its operations platform, thus enabling traders to concentrate on core business activities, and an investment manager whose equity desk has implemented a system to receive interactive notifications, allowing them to immediately act on trade opportunities from within the notifications themselves, thus speeding up complex workflows. This demonstrates how both buy-side and sell-side firms are embracing interoperability, says Schleifer.
“Interoperability as a trend very much started on the sell side,” he says. “Five years ago, it was mostly sell-side firms that had larger IT budgets and IT staff to implement these kinds of things. However, starting maybe three years ago, the buy side really turned up in force and realised that the benefits of interoperability are not specific to one side of the street.”
Interop.io and Lab49 are now committed to establishing new benchmarks in desktop integration, with interop.io’s interoperability maturity model providing strategic alignment rather than mere technical compatibility, says Schleifer.
“The interoperability maturity model helps people think through what it means to be a mature organisation around the two disciplines of interoperability, i.e. UI integration and workflow integration. Lab49 really understands that and has been helping clients achieve higher levels of maturity as they move further along the interop journey, as it expands from one desk to another and as it moves through the front office, middle office, and back office.”
Brian McAllister, Interactive Practice Head at Lab49 comments: “Platform modernisation is an important aspect that becomes increasingly essential to any participant in the capital market space. With interop.io, firms can achieve a better user experience with associated benefits that would be impossible in a web browser or simply too expensive to build from the ground up.”
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