As I write this, I’m sitting on a train coming back from Raleigh, North Carolina. Once I publish this column, I’ll officially start the second leg of a two-week vacation. To say that I’m disconnected from the world of fintech would be an understatement. Fortunately, I work with highly-talented individuals, so the site hasn’t skipped a beat. For this piece, I’m going to focus on our overarching editorial strategy in 2021, but first, here are some of the stories we published over the last seven days, should you have missed them.

First, Josephine Gallagher has a story about the European Securities and Markets Authority (Esma), saying that some firms struggled with trade data porting as a result of CME Group’s trade repository wind down.  

Speaking of Esma, broker-dealers say a new proposal by the regulator to force disclosure of all big-bank OTC derivatives trades won’t improve data.

Then, George Brandman, a managing director in the digital and platform services division of JP Morgan, tells Mariella Reason that a new program for distributing the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) could drive down the cost of the code for market participants. 

Next, a lawyer representing Nasdaq argued in court that the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is overstepping its authority in ordering the biggest exchanges to come up with a new governance plan for the public consolidated feeds of US equities market data, which would give more voting power to broker-dealers and other organizations that sit on the operating committees governing these feeds.

Additionally, Wei-Shen Wong gave some of her thoughts on Broadridge’s acquisition of Itiviti, looking at previous acquisitions by the two companies.

Also, in the desktop app interoperability space, OpenFin is rolling out Workspace, a user interface comprising a browser, integrated notification center, app store, and digital assistant. (Apparently, “Workspace” is the hot name for new platforms!)

Finally, low-latency network provider Avelacom has bought Brazilian infrastructure specialist ITDN to accelerate its LatAm expansion, especially in Brazil, which has proven to be a tough nut for outsiders to crack. 

Ok, let’s get to my column, which, in some ways, will serve as a “best of” post…but maybe it will prove interesting? Let’s see.

Editorial judgment

As I’ve tried to explain previously (and mostly incoherently), we’ve been slowly evolving our editorial strategy here at WatersTechnology over the last few years as we adjust to new market needs and realities. Back in the day, we’d publish, on average, about 15 stories per week, but they weren’t always “reported” stories—meaning they were press release rewrites—or they were single-source stories based on information already out there in the market. Basically, quantity often prevailed over quality.

Today, we only publish six to eight stories per week, and the vast majority of those (excluding the People Moves and This Week round-ups) are exclusive articles and are multi-sourced. Some are very long deep-dives about things like the sunsetting of Sseoms, the challenges of investing in private stocks, or a post-mortem on the GameStop fiasco and what it means for the alternative data industry going forward. We also break some big, industry-important news, like Symphony suspending Sparc, Bloomberg raising its data retention fees, Money.Net filing for bankruptcy, or Citi and Bank of America teaming on Project Octopus. (And all of those are from the last 15 days or so. “SCOOP!” as journalists with low self-esteem proclaim in ALL CAPS on Twitter Dot Com.)

Now, with that said, we make some editorial judgments, and if we can get a head start on some news that’s going to hit the wires later in the day, we’ll make an exception if it’s information we think our readers will find valuable/interesting. (The OpenFin and Avelacom stories mentioned before are examples.) As time goes on, there will be fewer of these posts, and more deep-dives and deeply-reported exclusives. Changing editorial policy is much like turning a cargo ship—it takes some time, and if you rush it, you end up bringing international trade to a dramatic halt…or, in our case, losing subscribers.

Buzzwords and actual trends

I felt it necessary to first explain our editorial outlook before looking at some of the big buzzwords we’ll continue to write about in 2021. Here’s my big problem with technology reporting today, and, to be sure, we’ve been very guilty of this: It’s a big hype machine, by and large. 

First, you have the major buzzwords: Blockchain! AI! Cloud! Quantum! The list goes on, but we’ll get to these and more in a bit.  

Then there’s the Goldman play: Put Goldman Sachs in your headline, you will get clicks. Some Goldman managing director farts, and there will be a few publications that explain why it smelled like roses. It’s the same for Bridgewater, Morgan, BofA, Google, Bloomberg, Amazon, and several other companies perceived to be titans. 

There’s also a flip side to that coin: One of those aforementioned companies does something negative, and every tech and finance reporter turns into Dr. J dunking from the free-throw line. (Or MJ. Or LeBron…I don’t know…learn some basketball history…whatever.) 

It all comes down to context. People want to know about the latest evolutions for certain buzzwords. They want to know what the biggest companies are working on. They want to hear about how those big companies screw up or have to make unpopular decisions. 

But at the end of the day, you have to provide context. Without context, you get some clicks on a story, but did the reader gain value? Probably not. 

Enough prologue, here’s the point: I’m going to list some things that we will look to better cover in 2021 and beyond. It’s not exhaustive, and with tech, things can change quickly. 

App Interoperability: If you’re a regular reader of this column, you knew this would emerge. I personally believe that there’s a revolution happening in the field of trading technology, and it’s being brought forth by the idea of interoperability. Now, here’s the problem: Interoperability means many things to many different companies. 

In one realm, you have the work that’s being done at OpenFin, Cosaic, and Glue42. There’s an interesting turf war there where everyone is playing nice, but it feels like a schism is happening and how that unfolds will be important: Can these companies continue to work in the same sphere—which, I think the banks and, increasingly, some large data providers, would like—or will the open interoperability projects get closed off quickly?

Then there’s what’s going on with the likes of BlackRock’s Aladdin platform, Goldman Sachs’ Marquee platform, or the integration between State Street Alpha and Charles River Development. The idea is interoperability with other third-party platforms, but they want to control the central ecosystem. So is that true interoperability? Many would argue, no…no, it is not.

And finally—at least as far as I see it, this third class comprises major data/research/terminal/workflow providers. Bloomberg believes in interoperability…to an extent. Refinitiv is trying to reinvent itself as a workflow/collaboration tool provider, moving away from the (Thomson Reuters) Eikon/Bloomberg Terminal wars. And in the post-Covid world where employees are working more and more remotely rather than in an office—whether hybrid or full-time(ish) remote—Symphony is looking to get a bigger cut of that pie at a time when the likes of Microsoft Teams and Slack have designs on the same market.

Every company I mentioned (and I’m sure I’m missing some) are for-profit entities. They’re not doing God’s work, and they’ll work together so long as it helps them grow users and profits. 

And this is why the app interop space interests me so much: cloud, open-sourced tools, containerization techniques, compute power, and storage are all exponentially improving, which means that gone are the days of closed-off, monolithic platforms…at least in theory. How do you make that work and make it sustainable—making it something that builds and builds and builds—is easier said than done. 

Some think app interop is a fad; I think it’s a revolution simply because of how retail tech has started to permeate the capital markets, and you can’t put the cap back on that genie bottle. Interop will become table stakes…but who deals those chips is anyone’s guess at this point.

Cloud & AI: Speaking of table stakes, every single bank, asset manager, and vendor loves to throw the terms “cloud” and “artificial intelligence”—or machine learning—around, but the simple fact is that, especially at end-user firms, these terms are used…um…liberally. 

Every bank and buy-side firm worth one’s salt has some cloud strategy (usually a hybrid model) and is connected to a fair amount of cloud-native platforms. And the term AI is so expansive, the savviest of snake oil salesman will make basic robotic process automation sound like the most bleeding-edge neural networks. 

So here’s what we, here at WatersTechnology, need to do a better job of—weed through the bullshit. It seems simple enough, but it’s incredibly hard. If any of the reporters on WatersTechnology—or most any other journalist—were experts in machine learning engineering, well, we likely wouldn’t be journalists. Our job is to talk to the experts and try to distill their complex ideas into something easily digestible for readers.

Cloud and AI are changing every industry under the sun…we just need to get better at reporting on these stories and not buying too much into the hype.

Low-Code & No-Code: I honestly don’t know how to feel about this subject (and I’ll use low-code as a catch-all for low-code and no-code for the purposes of this section). Back in September, we did our first deep-dive of the space, which featured some of the major low-code providers explaining why they think they are on to something major, and others that were skeptical of these platforms.  

In some ways, low-code feels like blockchain/DLT platforms—a hammer looking for a nail. Yeah, paying for high-end programmers, engineers, and data scientists is expensive, but quality talent comes with a price. You try and cut a corner with a low-code platform, you might get an acceptable result, but will it yield alpha-generating resulting via an order/execution/portfolio management system? Sounds dubious. 

Now here’s the thing: I’m hearing more and more about these platforms, and, specifically, Genesis. As we first reported, the Citi and Bank of America consortium project called Project Octopus is underpinned by the Genesis low-code platform. And Genesis was also selected by ChinaFICC to digitize and automate access for international investors to the growing Chinese markets.  

I’m still skeptical, but as more major outlets put their money behind these vendors, we’ll have to dig deeper. 

DLT/Blockchain: I’ve written plenty on this subject, and I don’t have much more to add than what I wrote a few weeks ago. What I will say is this: I’ve been proud that we have mostly written critically but (I believe) accurately on these tools, and we’ll look to continue to do that. 

Which brings us full circle to “editorial judgment.” I—Anthony (Tony) Laurence Joseph Malakian—do not believe in the DLT hype…but what the fuck do I know? Listen, when writing about “trend” subjects, our job is to listen to smart people and provide the most intelligent arguments on a subject as possible. This column is me—Anthony (Tony) Laurence Joseph Malakian—putting my personal (though hopefully educated) opinions on-page, and you, the reader, can let me know if we’re spot on, close, or way off base. 

We’re still going to write about market data fees/consolidation/dissemination/etcetera. We’re going to write about a swath of regulatory issues. We’re going to write about your day-to-day needs. As for the buzzwords, I hope that when we do cover these subjects, we do them in a thought-provoking way. If we don’t, I’m here to listen to your arguments: anthony.malakian@infopro-digital.com.

The image at the top of the page is Peter Henry Emerson’s ‘Rowing Home the Schoof-Stuff’, courtesy of The Cleveland Museum of Art.