The easy way to make your trading apps work together as one

April 22, 2021

Trading is a complex business. In fast-moving, competitive markets, traders need to process a lot of information to make their decisions. When that information is scattered across an assortment of unconnected systems and screens, traders can struggle with a high cognitive load. That weighs them down.

What if the trader could get all the information they needed in an instant, so they could make rapid decisions with confidence? For that, you need the applications on the trader’s desktop to work together and share data as if they were one system.

This kind of seamless interoperability on the trader’s desktop isn’t a new idea. But it has always been hard to achieve. It meant modifying each application one by one, a costly and time-consuming task for banks’ in-house technology teams. And that’s assuming the applications were based on the limited group of technologies that lent themselves to such integration, like .NET or Java. Today’s desktop applications can be based on a variety of technologies, including HTML5. Stitching them together this way is more complex than ever.

That’s why we’ve created the ION Desktop interoperability framework

With all these disparate technologies, it’s a big mistake to try to connect your applications one-to-one with no overall vision or standard. If you do it that way, all you get is a series of disconnected point-to-point integrations. These won’t be reusable when you add new applications to your ecosystem.

ION Desktop makes it easy to connect and integrate applications, regardless of their underlying technology. Whether they’re in-house legacy tools, third-party systems, or web apps, you can make them work together as a single system. Context-sharing uses the ION Desktop Bus, a messaging channel with a set of messages and protocols that enable your apps to share data.

The messages follow a pre-defined format to represent actions and events that applications on the desktop can react to.

An OMS and EMS that share data and work as a single system

ION’s LatentZero OMS and LatentZero Workstation (EMS) use the ION Desktop Bus to share context. That means when your traders use one of these apps, the information they’re working with flows seamlessly to the other.

For example, when they work on an order in your OMS, the instrument’s market data is instantly shown in your EMS. And when they select an instrument in your EMS, the OMS blotters immediately show all the orders for that instrument.

What’s more, you can use the open ION Desktop Bus API to share context from your in-house systems and drive your OMS and EMS in a similar way. This is particularly powerful if you use your own Portfolio Management System to submit orders into LatentZero OMS and want to follow how your orders are being executed. Equally, your back-office applications can be modified to respond to events when orders and executions are selected in LatentZero OMS and Workstation.

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Learn more about the ION LatentZero OMS and EMS solutions, and book a demo.