Some Businesses Take a Really Long Time to Build, FX isn’t One of Them

Recently, Euromoney Magazine published its annual FX Survey 2012. Whether or not you like the survey and trust its findings, at least there is entertainment value in the media coverage that discusses the results. A very entertaining article in the Wall Street Journal provided insights into the great lengths that several participants went to drum up support for their institutions. But there are statements from some of the protagonists that make me smile. Here are two examples:

“Instant results are difficult to achieve in foreign exchange.” (…) Coming in, you need to invest for three to five years before you see results on the scale that the top handful of banks have been [having].”

It’s a matter of perspective but I disagree. There might be some businesses that require multi-year investments before delivering results but FX is not one of them. I can think of a few wineries in Napa Valley where new crop has to mature for years before delivering world class product. Virgin America, on the other hand, launched an entire airline in three years. They achieved this by leveraging a variety of third party service providers to assemble their final product in record time. Likewise, launching your FX business need not require multiple years of investment to deliver a world-class FX product to the market. It can be as simple as setting up a network connection to Integral. You can be up and running in weeks. More complex deployments on FX Grid® might require several weeks or a few months but nothing in the neighborhood of three to five years. That’s just wrong. If you’re in the middle of such a project, consider cutting your losses and give us a call now. Read More »

Not all Clouds Are Created Equal

Not all clouds are the same, and I am not talking about the different ones you see up in the sky. The term cloud computing has reached true buzzword status by now, with everyone having a different understanding of what it means — which by the way is one characteristic of a buzzword.

I don’t want to add to the many interpretations of cloud computing out there, rather outline the most important characteristics that in my view define it: 1) Market participants receive and deliver services over the Internet. 2) They are sharing a common pool of IT infrastructure. 3) They have the ability to easily scale these services up or down in line with how their business needs change. 4) They pay for these services in a pay-as-you-go business model and, and 5) these services are managed by a provider. If all these statements are true, you are looking at a real example of cloud computing.

Open matters

Today, Integral announced an open platform for FX. While ‘open’ to some might just be yet another buzzword, it is critically important in this context. Read More »