Pivot Looks Beyond Instant Messaging With Launch of Pivot 360°
Pivot Solutions is expanding the scope of its services with a new product launch at the SIFMA Technology Management Conference. The company is unveiling Pivot 360 — a concept that pulls together research, analysis and trade entry through an automated workflow.
According to Lou Eccelston, CEO and chairman of Pivot Solutions (booth #1822), Pivot, which is based in New York and Boston, is positioning itself as an interenterprise performance network, meaning that it can satisfy external communications needs as well as provide the scalability and functionality to serve internal users.
Eccelston, who joined Pivot earlier this year from Thomson Financial, is spearheading the new strategy to position the company beyond IMTRADER, its flagship product, which turns instant messaging conversations into transactions that flow into an order management system and integrate with security and compliance.
"With IMTRADER we were breaking down the barriers between conversation and trading, and making the whole process more efficient," says Ed Daciuk, VP of products at Pivot. "360 is a broadening of what we were doing in the past," he adds, explaining that it pulls in all of the activity that goes on in capital markets, including pre-trade market liquidity, color, content and internal conversations.
"The goal of 360 is to reorient the trader's desktop to how they do business," comments Larry Tabb, CEO of Westborough, Mass-based TABB Group. While the buy side and the sell side enjoy using IM, the problem is that traditional IM channels are not feature-rich, he notes. "Pivot is trying to make that communications channel much more robust and much more financial-enterprise scalable, and in doing that, it enables more firms to be able to use that technology."
In terms of the customer base, "It's a big new thing," says Eccelston. "It's no longer a chat room. ... It's [about], 'How do I get all my trading information in one spot?'"
For example, "If you are an energy trader getting research reports and IOIs [indications of interest], you're getting information all around a thesis in one place," Eccelston continues. Pivot says the concept can be applied to any single market — including fixed income, derivatives and energy — and that Pivot has clients across most of these asset classes already.
As part of the new strategy, Pivot will introduce Pivot Points, which allows users to set up minicommunities that bring together people, content and services. "We're creating a central place where market players can pull all that together and collaborate with internal people, external providers and data providers," explains Eccelston.
Pivot also is launching Pivot work spaces — personalized dashboards that can aggregate and filter all the material for a particular sector or stock, or from certain partners. According to Pivot, behind the aggregation and filtering is structured messaging — the company has developed a proprietary technology to take in information and tag it.
Lastly, Pivot is expanding upon a broadcast management capability it introduced with IMTRADER and aiming it at brokers, and content and data providers that want to target information to their user base. "Here again, structured messaging is going to have a big impact on being able to target where you are sending your information and who's responding with transactions," says Eccelston.
Ivy is Editor-at-Large for Advanced Trading and Wall Street & Technology. Ivy is responsible for writing in-depth feature articles, daily blogs and news articles with a focus on automated trading in the capital markets. As an industry expert, Ivy has reported on a myriad ... View Full Bio
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