FIX Collaboration: CameronTec To Buy Greenline Financial Technologies

CameronTec, a leading provider of Financial Information Exchange (FIX) technology and infrastructure announced a definitive agreement to acquire Greenline Financial Technologies, the leading provider of FIX technology solutions and services.

The unity of FIX technology and infrastructure, with solutions and services, is a highly complementary business plan. Greenline was previously a wholly-owned subsidiary of MarketAxess Holdings, which used (and continues to use) CameronTec for their technology. With the sale to CameronTec, the companies are now merged into a single entity, creating an offering stronger than the sum of its parts.

Financial Information Exchange, or FIX, is an industry driven language for electronic communications used to send information related to securities to market players. The FIX protocol progressively became the base standard for financial information communications, and has been adopted across asset classes and is today pervasive across the entire trade life cycle globally.

About 15 years ago, around the time this FIX language emerged, Cameron built a FIX engine that produces messages in the FIX protocol and interacts with a number of systems, sending messages and market data. Meanwhile, Greenline was building some testing, certification and monitoring software around FIX. Indeed when you use the FIX protocol you need to run a number of tests to make sure the systems behave as expected, and once in production you need to monitor order flows.

Max Colas, CameronTec's chief strategy officer says, the two companies were essentially partners, growing over the years and on several occasions worked on the same deployment. Both have since grown, expanding their products around FIX installations and professional services, and recently into non-FIX protocols too.

"So here we are, CameronTec, a leader in FIX technology, joining forces with the leader in FIX testing and certification, Greenline," says Colas in an interview. "On both sides we have services to address needs to deploy, monitor manage, and advise on how to optimize flows on global scale.

We believe that the combination of the world's best products on both sides, and the expertise we get from combining our teams, will enable us to provide a one-stop shop approach to managing trading flows. CameronTec has the trading terminals and messaging technology and Greenline brings monitoring, testing and certification technology to complement our offerings."

Really, when you think about it, it seems like destiny that these two should merge as one.

On the day of the announcement, CameronTec CEO Anders Henriksson commented "This is great news for the global electronic trading community. Greenline’s superior FIX operational technology and services coupled with CameronTec’s leading connectivity technology and trading tools creates a compelling end-to-end trading and services platform for the global financial industry."

"For existing FIX customers as well as the broader financial services community, this is a particularly positive development as it delivers extended value from integrated products and signals a sharper customer focus, stronger development investment and even more powerful deployments. Greenline's CEO Josh Tolman will make a welcome addition to our executive management team."

The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2013.

Becca Lipman is Senior Editor for Wall Street & Technology. She writes in-depth news articles with a focus on big data and compliance in the capital markets. She regularly meets with information technology leaders and innovators and writes about cloud computing, datacenters, ... View Full Bio