Logiscope Nick Dyne Managing Director

PREVIEW 2001

Logiscope provides a range of installation, support and consulting services for trading rooms. Its development implementation and support of the products provides solutions to the connectivity requirements of the trading room environment.

What is the most important thing that happened to the market data industry last year?

Two things - Thompson buying Primark -- the question is whether they will be able to take on Reuters and Bloomberg. The second thing is the emergence of XML as a genuine standards contender.

What will happen to market data in 2001? For example - Will prices drop?

We will see further concentration of vendors in the professional markets. The big players will swallow up small or specialist vendors with unique content as they complete their product offerings. New entrants will further undermine the value of real-time price information; to compensate, the major data vendors will move further into providing higher added value data to maintain overall price and prevent a significant erosion of margins. The publishing of market data outside of the professional market will become more important to both the vendors and sell side institutions - more and more data services will be "soft dollared" as was common practice in the 1980s.

Will competition increase between vendors, or will vendors consolidate?

Both. Power will be further concentrated as suggested above. However, the need for further growth will drive all the players to focus more aggressively on their rivals' core business areas. The Equity sector will be highly competitive with all of the major players fighting it out. Reuters will have to strengthen their offering in Fixed Income, whilst they expect increased competition in foreign exchange and money markets.

Where do you think market data vendors will be in five years?

They will either go bust or become global consumer brands. Their involvement in transaction processing will become more and more important to their survival.

What standards will be important in 2001? FpML? MDML? For what specific purpose?

That's a hard one. Each XML documentation type definition (DTD) has strengths and weaknesses; by its very nature these definitions cannot be proprietary and will threaten vendors for whom ownership of format has been advantageous. Further, they actually address different problems. The ones that win out will be the ones that achieve the required degree of user penetration to become de facto standards--and that might not be the best ones. Logiscope is placing bets on all of them!

What is the most important new product or initiative you will bring to market in 2001?

LiveXML. It's an XML-based architecture for moving both market data and transactions and is designed to be DTD independent. A number of major application service providers (ASP) based trading services are launching this year with LiveXML as the underlying transport and presentation mechanism.

When will this/these happen?

Our clients are the global transaction and data vendors. It is up to our clients to determine the timing of their new product launches.

What are the dynamic factors driving your business?

The move to web-based trading systems which requires next generation IP-based data delivery into browsers and legacy systems along with the resultant requirement for better middle and back office integration.

What industry development is of the most interest to you?

The rollout of the ASP based FX trading systems - both interbank and bank to corporate.

What industry development concerns you most?

Consolidation of ECNs. We have products that are integral to the whole e-trading sector and the fewer ECNs there are, the less we can sell. Another major concern is the potential skills shortage in both our London and New York operations. And Easyscreen's share price.

What will be the next major project for your company?

Hazelnut.

If you had the money, personally, what would you invest in?

I'd invest in a cigarette and booze machine on a desert island for all the washed-up dot coms.

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