The romance between ABN AMRO Clearing (ACC) and Fidessa is a strategic and growth-oriented one and the relationship is driven by James Fairweather.
James Fairweather is the global head of execution services at ACC. He is driving this installation and rollout of Fidessa’s systems at ABN.
ABN AMRO Clearing is hoping to expand beyond active traders into services for corporate clients and even prime broker services, and Fairweather said Fidessa’s platform is the right fit for the job.
“The breadth of technology was better with Fidessa,” Fairweather said on Monday from London in a telephone interview. He noted Fidessa has previously offered fragmented solutions including an in-house platform, the ACC Global Gateway.
Moving to Fidessa was part of a request for proposal (RFP) in 2015 to replace ACC’s previous offerings. They settled on two vendors: Fidessa and Trading Technologies. Besides adding Fidessa, ABN AMRO Clearing is keeping the TT relationship based on the sheer number of TT screens ACC offered, Fairweather said.
For ABN AMRO Clearing, building its own system and maintaining it was a costly proposition, Fairweather said. Also pushing ACC towards a single platform were increasing regulatory change costs.
One of the big advantages for ACC is that Fidessa’s platform acts like a single “Consolidated Audit Trail.” This gave them greater control of their data for internal compliance and interacting with the regulators.
So far ACC has about 60 venues live on the system, which is about 80 percent rolled out to current customers.
Customers having one connection to many markets is a big efficiency increase for clients, and easier for ACC to support. Adding new trading venues now “is plug and play for numerous liquidity pools,” Fairweather said.
There are improvements yet to come in the form of execution algos, smart order routing and hook-ups through brokers to markets where ABN is not a member.
It looks to me like the continuation of a beautiful relationship.
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