Goldman Sachs has slated a significant fourth-quarter rollout to the firm's Marquee automated trading platform according to company executives.
“We have a huge ambition, a cross-asset integrated agency and principal platform for accessing liquidity across all of the products and making that liquidity available to our client in a variety of formats," said Marty Chavez, out-going CFO at Goldman Sachs, during the company's third-quarter earnings call.
Chavez, who will take on the co-leadership of the firm's securities business in the near future, expects that Goldman Sachs employees and clients will use the same set of tools over Marquee and that client will connect their systems directly to the firm's platform.
In the meantime, the firm is re-engineering its legacy FICC systems to automate processes further and increase their ability to scale while funding the re-engineering organically, he added.
The firm plans to leverage many of the themes that it found successful in its equities business.
"There are a lot of parallels to equities," he noted. "Of course the market structure is different, and these businesses will evolve differently and at different speeds."
Although Chavez views FICC as a "people" business, he wants to provide people with the tools that permit them to do their best and leaving to machines what they do best.
"I would not like to compete with my HP 12c to see who can add or multiply the faster," he said. "That is the general theme."
The continuing pressure on margins also a major reason for the upgrades, according to Chavez.
“It is just the way of the world, compression wherever you look,” he said. “That is a trend that we are embracing and not resisting.”
Goldman Sachs began deploying Marquee to its London office at the start of the year under the leadership of John Lynch, a managing director at Goldman Sachs, the Financial News reported earlier this year.
