Weeden & Co. Shifts to FlexOMS for Handling Exponential Volumes

Weeden & Co. LP has switched its sell-side order-management system from SunGard BRASS to FlexOMS, a new system built from scratch by FlexTrade Systems Inc.

The move was announced this morning nearly six months after Weeden, an institutional brokerage firm headquartered in Greenwich, Conn., went live with the new OMS on February 1st of 2008. Known for program trading and algorithmic trading, Weeden was looking for an OMS that could handle the high volumes in the middle and back-office. Weeden made the decision to switch to a new OMS in response to higher trading volumes and modern technology.

"Weeden's trade volume was exponentially increasing due to program and algorithmic trading," according to Amit Chatterjee, Weeden's managing director and Chief Information Officer who responded to questions via email. "We needed a middle office OMS system architecture that could handle trade volumes far in excess of what we had historically done without the burden of adding excessive hardware," writes Chatterjee in an email. "Our big concern was making sure our back-office booking system could handle the level of business we were executing," wrote Chatterjee.

Modern technology was a factor in Weeden's decision to change. "FlexTrade was building a system from ground up with the latest technology," continues the CIO. "At a technology level, the system had no theoretical limits on trading volumes and would run on a fraction of our OMS server footprint," explained Chatterjee.

Though Weeden will continue to utilize its proprietary front-end trading systems and routing systems, those systems are now fully integrated with the FlexOMS middle and back-office systems. "All of our business will be booked into the FlexOMS middle office product. "We now have a state-of-the art front-to- back solution to help service our clients," adds Chatterjee.

In choosing FlexTrade, a global provider of low-latency program trading since 1996, Weeden is going with a vendor that has tackled high volumes in the EMS space and was a pioneer in extending algorithmic trading to options, FX and listed derivatives. "We had long experience in the EMS space and dealing with high volumes of transactions of market data. It was natural for us to expand our expertise in the OMS space," comments Vijay Kedia, CEO of FlexTrade Systems in Great Neck, New York.

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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