Fidessa group plc (LSE: FDSA) today announced the launch of its  Partnership Program which enables selected third parties to integrate their services directly into Fidessa's global trading workflow platform.

Market participants have always recognised the role that technology can play in delivering value and demonstrating relevance to their customers. The challenge with this today, however, is that many new innovations need to be plugged directly into the traders' workflow in order to be truly effective, compliant and resilient.

"Fidessa recognised that its global distribution and workflow infrastructure could be used to curate and deliver third party applications as well as our own", says Steve Grob, Director of Group strategy at Fidessa. "Our role in this program is to evaluate and select the right partners that add real value and integrate their tools with Fidessa's platform, data and community."  

At the centre of the program is a technical framework that allows multiple third party applications to work directly in context with Fidessa's award winning trading workflow software.  In addition, these third parties can leverage Fidessa's infrastructure and global reach to provide a completely unified trading experience.  This means that the challenges of security, scale and resilience are solved for firms wishing to enter the capital markets space.

"We put in a lot of effort to seamlessly integrate these applications into our trading platform", continues Grob. "This means they appear as part of the user's familiar Fidessa desktop and automatically update to show relevant information as users navigate their Fidessa system." 

The first partner in this program is OTAS Technologies, which provides a range of unique market analysis tools that offer key insights into live trading conditions. These empower traders to deepen the discussions and communications that they have with their own customers.

"We are excited to have been selected as the first partner in this program", comments Tom Doris, CEO of OTAS Technologies. "We have worked closely with Fidessa's development, deployment and compliance teams as part of this initiative. This now positions us well for the next phase of our growth by providing a common lexicon for the industry to interpret trading performance across increasingly complex markets."

James Blackburn, Global Head of Sell-side Equities Product Marketing at Fidessa, adds: ”The OTAS tools form a key part of our optimised trading initiative and sit alongside our Order Performance Monitor. They provide traders with detailed market micro-structure analysis and the ability to drill down and understand why their orders are trading the way they are, as well as what factors might be influencing them."

On top of this, Fidessa is also evaluating applications from other dynamic software companies that deliver visualisation and analytics, as well as interesting ways of combining structured and unstructured data such as news and social media.

"Going forward we will add more and more of these tools to further enrich and add value to the trading capabilities that we provide to our clients. This will ensure that the very best new financial markets technology, regardless of who builds it, will make its true impact felt on the trading desks of today and in the future”, concludes Blackburn.

Find out more about the Partnership Program and the OTAS analysis tools in Fidessa's latest video "Fidessa on Equities: 3. The Fidessa Partnership Program" available at www.fidessa.com/video.