Stephen Murphy, CEO of Genesis Global.
Genesis Global won the award for Best Tool for Trading Efficiency at this year's European Market's Choice Awards. Co-founder and CEO Stephen Murphy speaks to Global Trading about the company's performance this year and client reaction.
What has driven your success this year?
This year, we took a series of bold steps to make the Genesis Application Platform more accessible and easier for financial institutions to test and adopt our technology. First, new tools allow users to see the power of our platform at a glance. Second, we transformed testing with a free trial program, enabling users to experience Genesis by quickly building applications that address their use cases. Finally, for companies that are ready to use the platform in production, we introduced usage-based pricing, tying our clients' costs to the value they get from Genesis. These advancements provide a “Eureka” moment for our clients to understand the capabilities of our platform and streamline how they can make our technology a pillar of their digitalization strategy.
We're also rolling out product enhancements more quickly. In June, we began formal monthly releases that deliver upgrades to the platform's development suite, runtime environment, and component marketplace. We want to maximize developer productivity, and this increased pace of releases ensures we can provide developers with new capabilities on an ongoing basis.
What investments have you focused on to support this growth?
This year, we've made significant investments in tools to help developers get started with Genesis and enhance how the platform accelerates building complex financial applications. For example, Create is a new web-based tool that enables users to build applications in minutes by configuring business objects, data sources, data queries and the UI foundation.
No code is required, but you interact with the platform directly to kick off very robust applications. It's a great way for developers to learn our platform and experience for themselves how Genesis can help you go from whiteboard to market 10x faster than traditional coding. It also allows users to build and reconfigure prototypes in near real-time, which is useful when your application has multiple types of users. Create allows developers to iterate on proofs of concept to drive engagement with business stakeholders.
Another game-changing feature for developers is the Marketplace – a library of pre-built solutions, templates, components and integrations within the platform that users can import into their projects. Users have access to over 30 integrations covering market data feeds (Bloomberg, Refinitiv, S&P Global), trading and portfolio systems (Murex, Fidessa, Geneva) and various service providers (CTM, Pershing, SS&C).
The Marketplace dramatically improves developer productivity by allowing developers to simply import the functionality they need into their projects, rather than having to build things like data integrations from scratch multiple times.
Genesis' complete solutions are also part of the marketplace. This includes robust applications for trade allocation, real-time matching, primary market investing, custody, credit insurance, and asset management. With other vendors, these would be standalone products. Not with us. With Genesis, clients have direct access to nearly everything we've built, creating a force multiplier for the industry. Of course, users can also customize these solutions using the platform, but they benefit greatly from leveraging the applications pre-built by Genesis. We are continually adding new elements to the marketplace, including large-scale solutions.
What has been the response from the industry?
Financial markets firms are under immense pressure to grow revenue, contain costs and reduce risk. Technology is a key strategic lever, but modernizing and digitizing is extremely complex for most companies. In part, this is because they operate on a set of interdependent legacy technologies. Maintaining existing technology is a huge drain on resources, and as a result, according to Gartner, most companies invest only 11 percent of their IT budget in new, innovative technologies.
Genesis Global's Colette Aubertin (left) and Peternell Kinman (right) accepted the award at EMCA on July 3.
We’ve been in that world for a long time, but we knew the industry needed a new way to write financial markets grade software, so we founded Genesis.
Customers use Genesis to power six business strategies. Three are aimed at suppressing, extending, or replacing legacy systems. First, we build flexible “scaffolding” around vendor systems to help financial institutions limit their dependency on the vendor. This allows financial institutions to extend the capabilities of the vendor platform while creating options to migrate away from third-party solutions. Second, some legacy technologies need to be enhanced, not replaced. Our ability to integrate with a variety of systems gives Genesis a unique advantage in building new capabilities driven by core systems, helping customers take a best-of-breed approach in technology selection. Third, Genesis has an unparalleled ability to help quickly and cost-effectively replace end-user computing and manual processes, including reliance on spreadsheets, with robust, auditable applications.
To generate new revenue through faster innovation, the Genesis Platform makes application development fast and easy, empowering generalist developers to build specialty software. Not only does it dramatically speed up back-end and front-end coding, but the runtime environment built into the platform ensures compliance, security, resiliency, and processing power are all financial market grade. Similarly, these attributes make Genesis a natural foundation on which to build new high-performance market infrastructure. Octaura, the first electronic trading platform for syndicated loans and CLOs, and Neptune, a fixed income market data hub, are examples of how Genesis is driving market-changing services.
Finally, improving developer productivity is a critical use case, especially given the cost and scarcity of engineering talent. Enabling developers to build quickly and with high quality while maintaining strict control enables enterprises to realize their innovative potential. Large banks are benchmarking engineering productivity, measured by the speed at which they deliver product features, the agility and stability of new technologies. Genesis delivers on both these and other productivity metrics.
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