Although bullish when discussing the competition, BT Radianz’s CEO is acutely aware of the importance that relationships have to play in his vision for the company’s future. Dan Barnes explains.

The acquisition of Radianz by BT was potentially one of the most significant events of 2005 in the world of banking IT. A secure network for provision of financial services is becoming increasingly important to many businesses, not only the banks themselves.

In combining the scale of Radianz with BT’s sales expertise, the company has all the raw materials necessary for supporting this area of finance in the future. Rick Snape, CEO of BT Radianz, notes that the future for his company lies in partnerships: “The BT Radianz business model is a community model. We specialise in connectivity between financial institutions and liquidity sources like exchanges, where BT traditionally is more of an enterprise model. We can leverage the strengths of both to our advantage.”

Mr Snape is keen to stress those strengths that the acquisition has given Radianz: a greatly increased global sales force and strong potential for joint service offerings with other parts of BT Global Financial Services.

Open market

In Europe, BT Radianz is opening up stock exchanges such as the London Stock Exchange (LSE), Euronext and Deutsche Börse to wider audiences and Mr Snape is confident that other major networks will not have the ability to compete with his organisation for such projects “We did the same last year with Nasdaq, which used to be a closed environment. They opened it up to one network provider and we welcomed the competition. We are confident we can win the business in an open market.”

Currently his organisation is assisting with some of the regulatory challenges that are hounding the industry. Teams within BT Radianz are engaging in a dialogue with the industry on the Directive on Markets in Financial Instruments (MiFID) and Reg NMS (the US and EU regulations aimed to improve best execution). Notes Mr Snape: “We see a number of challenges ahead for the industry. I think that we’re going to see an explosion of market data volumes and an increase in external data publication and we’re here to facilitate that process.

“The predicted trading data volumes don’t intimidate us, we have a very scaleable architecture. The challenge is for market data vendors in aggregating the data and republishing the data. The pressure is on them and we’re working with a number of them to find solutions.”

In the main, however, the current hunger for speed is driving business. Mr Snape acknowledges recent comments that even the speed of light is proving a constraint on business for some customers: “In the direct market access area we’re finding that the physics of data speed is key. So groups like brokers and hedge funds are putting their black boxes as close as they can to an exchange to leverage the physics.

“We’re helping both the buy side and the sell side to facilitate what we call Radianz Proximity.” This in turn is contributing to the increasing volumes of trading data, and is adding to the much maligned complexity found in trade processing, he explains. “We don’t see a centralisation of processing, at least in the trading environment, but a decentralisation, a ‘distributing out’, as close to the exchanges as possible. There is a need for speed, not for centralisation.”

Service extension

Although bullish when discussing competition, Mr Snape is very aware of the importance that relationships have to play in his vision for the future of BT Radianz. As a result, the organisation is forming partnerships with content providers and application providers to facilitate a broader offering to the market, while providing the service platform: “So we’re extending our services beyond the simple extranet service.”

Mr Snape outlines his view that software vendors are changing the way they distribute their product, “We see a convergence of applications and networks. They have to be seamless in terms of working together. To answer this we provide a [24/7] service wrap including answering the telephones, monitoring all the systems on a global basis – we can provide a global service for application providers. We’re transforming the business model for many software providers, as well as providing a service for companies.”

CAREER HISTORY:

2004: Joined BT Radianz 2003: President of SunGard Market Data Services. Directed operating unit that provides real-time and historical data products to North American equities institutions 1994: Co-CEO at Bridge Information Systems 1990: President of Bankers Trust Financial Services Information Systems 1982: Vice-president of sales and marketing at Telerate Systems 1977: McGraw Hill 1976: Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale University

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