CitiVelocity 2.0 (Excellent UX design)

Posted on January 26, 2012 by Paul Blank

Earlier this week, in optimising single dealer platforms, I made reference to the latest version of Citi’s hugely successful  CitiVelocity 2.0 platform, which is built on Caplin’s technology.

Below is a screen shot of the platform, taken from FX-MM. It’s really elegant, with a clear compact design.

According to Anil Prasad, Citi’s Global Head of Foreign Exchange, Velocity2.0 is designed for Citi’s wholesale and institutional clients, and will be available to 100,000 Citi clients.

It looks great, and is clearly packed with business functionality, and is capable of delivering deep liquidity, with minimal latency, on a truly massive scale.

CitiVelocity 2.0 (showing FX options strategies and analytics)
A definite winner!

Filed under: FX, Single-Dealer Platforms, User Experience (UX) | Leave a Comment »

Changes to the FXall IPO filing, are bank shareholders selling up?

Posted on January 26, 2012 by Paul Blank

FXall the multidealer FX platform that announced their intention for an FXall IPO last December, yesterday updated their IPO filing with the SEC to reflect changes in the use of the proceeds from the IPO.

The initial filing on page 28 here, stated with regard to the use of the proceeds that:

We intend to use the net proceeds from the sale of common stock by us in this offering for working capital and other general corporate purposes, including potential acquisitions

However, that same section in the revised filing on page 29 here , states simply:

We will not receive any proceeds from the sale of shares of our common stock by the selling stockholders, including any shares sold by the selling stockholders in connection with the exercise of the underwriters’ option to purchase additional shares.

Could this mean that FXall bank shareholders, and initial equity backers are thinking of cashing in their chips?

Read more »

Filed under: FX, Regulation, SEF, Single-Dealer Platforms | Leave a Comment »

Optimising performance of single-dealer platforms

Posted on January 22, 2012 by Paul Blank

Many of the posts in this blog quite rightly focus on how single dealer platforms (SDPs) solve the problem of delivering compelling business workflows to clients right across the trade life-cycle. And why a well researched and intuitive UX design, is so critical to the usability of the platform by end users.

CitiVelocity 2.0 is stylish, compact, and looks great!

However, perhaps we don’t talk here enough about how important it is to help clients optimise the performance of their trading platform over the internet for very large numbers of end users, to ensure it’s always delivering added value.

Read more »

Filed under: FX, Latency, Paul Blank, Single-Dealer Platforms, Technology Trends | 1 Comment »

Tabb research validates Caplin’s position on SDPs providing SEF Aggregation

Posted on January 18, 2012 by Paul Blank

At Caplin, we have long been saying that SDPs will provide SEF aggregation services (here, here, here , here  and here).

Faced with Dodd Frank mandate for SEF execution of cleared products, bank single dealer platforms (SDPs) would provide SEF aggregation and smart order routing services that enable their buyside clients to access liquidity, whether from the bank, or from SEFs.

So, it’s nice  to see Tabb Group research now confirm our view.

Read more »

Filed under: Dodd Frank, OTC, Paul Blank, Regulation, SEF, Single-Dealer Platforms, Survey Results | Leave a Comment »

Dodd-Frank in One Graph…..

Posted on January 18, 2012 by Scott McLeod

Saw this last night – it isn’t often that you can reduce 849 pages of legislation to a one page graph but Karen Weise has a decent shot at it. The graph is here.

Filed under: Dodd Frank, Scott McLeod | Leave a Comment »

AFME argues EU’s Financial Transaction Tax (FTT) would increase FX costs up to 18 times

Posted on January 18, 2012 by Paul Blank

AFME the Association for Financial Markets in Europe, has released a paper (in conjunction with Oliver Wyman), that shows the proposed European Financial Transaction Tax (FTT) would increase FX transaction costs by between 9 and 18 times.

The report highlights both the primary impact of the tax – increased transaction costs, relocation of trading and reduction in nominal turnover, but also looks at the secondary impact – reduction in liquidity, leading to widening of bid/ask spreads:

  • Directly increase transaction costs by 3-7 times, and up to 18 times for most actively traded segments Read more »

Filed under: FX, OTC, Paul Blank, Regulation, Survey Results | Leave a Comment »

Is Considering UX Design Revolutionary?

Posted on January 16, 2012 by Scott McLeod

I have been involved in a number of projects with our UX team recently & have been pleasantly surprised at the insights that they produce.

In one case the bank had already built a substantial list of requirements. We began our engagement, as we always do, with UX research – and the team not only indentified a bunch of end-user requirements that were about the way *they* preferred the interaction but also recommended several unique pieces of functionality which the end-users would really value – likely to make the resulting single-dealer platform (1) unique for the bank, (2) more useful and therefore (3) more likely to retain the bank’s customers.

Not only that, but by building a design for the user interaction before starting to write code, the whole development process was massively accelerated.

Only a handful of years ago few people had heard of user experience design, today it’s become the essential first step in building a new web trading application. Putting the users’ needs first – now that IS a revolution.

Filed under: Scott McLeod, Technology Trends, User Experience (UX) | Leave a Comment »

More to the need for single dealer systems than meets the eye

Posted on January 12, 2012 by dbullen

The whole topic of single-dealer systems seems to get lost in only talk of new regulations. There are many reasons why broker-dealers want and need a single platform to demonstrate their wares to clients and potential clients.

Many of those reasons are as old as the hills; to have a salesforce speaking one-language, to distribute research, andh to share complex trade ideas with analytical support to back them up.

Live executable prices are a relatively new part of the jigsaw.  The justification for single-dealer builds has always been a portfolio of different interests which has led to much of the difficulty of getting these efforts to market.

And whilst some of the new regulations detract from the desire for single-dealer trading platforms a few new trends actually enhance the need for them.

Two that spring to mind are: Read more »

Filed under: Dodd Frank, OTC, Single-Dealer Platforms | Leave a Comment »

Why 2012 will be the year of HTML5

Posted on January 10, 2012 by paulcaplin

2012 is all set to be an exceptionally unpredictable year. What’s going to happen to the Euro? The global economy? Oil prices? Middle Eastern regimes?

Luckily, there’s one thing that’s pretty certain. In 2012, HTML5 will become the world’s favourite GUI technology, and in particular the No. 1 choice for building online trading applications.

Yesterday I started writing a post on why this now seems so inevitable. But a few hundred words in, I realised that there was so much to say on the subject − so many sources to quote, so many trends to map, so many statistics to analyse − that it was way more than a blog-sized chunk.

So I am re-casting the article as a white paper, which we’ll release within the next two weeks. Keep your eye on this site, and I’ll post an announcement as soon as it’s ready for you to download.

Filed under: HTML5, Paul Caplin, Single-Dealer Platforms, Technology Trends | Leave a Comment »

10 years on Microsoft celebrate the death of IE6

Posted on January 10, 2012 by Jennifer Reid

10 years ago, a browser was born

IE6 was the most widely used web browser during its tenure, surpassing Internet Explorer 5.x. In 2002 and 2003, IE6 had a total market share of nearly 90%. goodbyeIE6Widely reported to be plagued with security problems, there have been for some time widespread frustrations from those in IT who have to support it. In 2010, a Downing Street petition called for the UK government to stop using IE6 and to upgrade to a newer browser.

These days, Microsoft is celebrating the demise of IE6 (with cake!) By December 2011 (as shown by the Internet Explorer Countdown page) IE6 was used by less than 1% of US internet surfers.

HTML5 shares the cake Read more »

Filed under: HTML5, Technology Trends | Leave a Comment »

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