Eze Castle Developing Order Management System for State Street Global Link

Eze Castle, the Boston-based provider of trade order management systems, is currently developing an order management platform for State Street Corp.'s online institutional portal, Global Link.

The site, which provides more than 250 asset managers in 19 countries with access to research, money management tools and electronic execution, intends to provide users with an integrated trade blotter based on Eze Castle's order management system, Trader Console (TC).

David Quinlan, head of marketing at Eze Castle, says State Street approached the vendor late last year, when the firm realized it needed a more robust set of order management tools for its FX Connect product, a foreign exchange trading system found on Global Link. "Yeah, they have some execution tools in there, but they don't have a central blotter," Quinlan recounts. "Our goal with them was to create a centralized spot within Global Link where you can input and manage all your trades, whether they be foreign exchange, equities or fixed income."

He explains that the system used by Global Link will most definitely be a pared-down version of TC, but will provide the essential tools required by a portfolio manager. "It's definitely a lighter-weight version of our product," Quinlan explains. "We didn't want to give away the whole product. Our goal was to give them a phase-one trade order management system, and as they want to review more robust trade-order-management systems, maybe we can sit down and talk."

Where users of FX Connect had previously been required to trade with State Street, the financial services powerhouse has opened up the product to other brokers. As such, money managers trading via the imbedded Eze Castle system will be able to transact directly with any brokers that have signed on with FX Connect.

Quinlan says that part of Eze Castle's decision to participate in the endeavor was that it allows the vendor to move into the application service provider world. He points out that while the ASP model provides a good deal of cost savings to money management firms, whether large or small, many of them are not jumping at the idea of throwing out their trade data to servers that reside outside their firm.

"Imagine walking up to a fund manager and you go, 'Use the ASP model,' and they go, 'So you're telling me to house my position data in some random server in Boston?' and you just say 'Yeah,'" Quinlan says. "What's great is that, not only does State Street bring a great custodial housing tank for their ASP servers, but it also brings its history of housing sensitive account data for the buy side community."

He expects beta-testing of the trading system will begin toward the fourth quarter, with the system going live by the end of the year.