Blaylock Deploys Fidessa

Boutique equities-trading firm Blaylock Robert Van (BRV) has spent the summer rolling out a new hosted order management system (OMS) from trading platform and market connectivity provider Fidessa.

"We terminated our previous connections [to the legacy OMS] on June 20 and switched to the Fidessa implementation on June 22," says Russell Ware, executive vice president of global trading at BRV.

The US-based, 50-employee firm previously used a hosted OMS from Tradeware to support its domestic and international equities trading operations.

The new Fidessa deployment is being used for BRV's domestic single-stock and equities basket trading operations, according to officials.

"We haven't connected any of the clients that we have previously had on our international trading desk," says Ware. "We've been so busy that we haven't set a timetable for this yet. We have a lot on our plate just building the relationships and trading with the passive [trading] clients who want large basket trading capabilities. There's a ton to do right there and building out the international business could easily eat up a year or more," he adds.

As a result, BRV officials don't expect to exploit Fidessa's foreign exchange (FX) or options trading capabilities in the near term. "Everything is client-driven," says Ware. "If the business segment is large enough, we will look at it as long as it is driven from the other side."

The brokerage began investigating possible replacements for its legacy OMS during the second half of 2009, says Eric Standifer, president of BRV. "We made the decision to go with Fidessa in the late autumn and signed the contracts and began implementation in early spring this year."

During the implementation the vendor had six employees in the BRV office working on the deployment for days at a time, according to Derrick Bargarozza, senior vice president, institutional equities at BVR. "They also had two people sitting with us for a couple of day to make sure everything was all right," he adds.