MDX Technology (MDXT), a market data connectivity specialist and provider of an enterprise data sharing solution, has signed up ING Bank as its twelfth European customer and is building out its business in the US and Asia ahead of a move into South America.
ING Bank selected MDXT’s Connect enterprise data sharing solution to improve communication between its fixed income traders in Amsterdam and its global institutional sales offices. Previously, the bank published trading data to an external third-party data vendor to which the sales teams subscribed. With Connect, data can be taken from the bank’s trading platform and put into Microsoft Excel, where traders can add value to the data before it is distributed to the global sales force, a solution that keeps data in-house, lowers costs and provides sales people with instant access to data created for them by traders.
Paul Watmough, CEO at MDXT, explains how Connect works at ING, saying: “The software subscribes to house prices from ING’s trading platform and the data is brought into an Excel spreadsheet where traders add value to it. The data is then input into a data cache that acts as a live feed, allowing the sales guys to subscribe to a mirror image of the spreadsheet and access the data distributed by the traders.”
To date, ING is live with Connect across Europe and is planning a phase two deployment that will extend the use of the solution into the US and Asia in the third quarter.
Marcus Welling, head of fixed income trading at ING Bank, describes Connect as a ‘whiteboard in the sky, a place where you can store all the info you want’. He says: “ING’s strategy is to deliver an excellent customer experience by offering appealing and transparent products and services, multi-access distribution and efficient and effective operations. MDX has helped us work towards this goal. We are not as dependent on our internal IT department when we require new functionality and with Excel and Connect we can build almost anything.”
Connect is technology agnostic, allowing it be used in a variety of ways, and is quick to deploy, lightweight, efficient and cost effective. Among the company’s 12 customers in Europe, CMC Markets was an early adopter Connect and now has a large Connect user base subscribing to shared information. Commodities broker Marex Spectron uses the software to share price data across its global broking desks.
Bringing MDXT’s total customer number to around 25, the company has users in the US and Asia, ranging from Tier 1 investment banks to regional banks, brokers, asset managers, hedge funs and proprietary traders, and is planning to expand sales into South America.
The company’s product roadmap is equally busy and includes adding more vendor data sources to the Excel plug-in and moving elements of the software into the server environment. In March 2014, the company ported the cache component of Connect to the Windows environment and it is working on a similar solution for Linux. Looking further ahead, Watmough comments: “We are considering using the technology to develop more end user solutions, perhaps around pricing or risk management.”
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