CHALLENGE:
Morgan Stanley Investment Management (MSIM) is the global capital management arm of Morgan Stanley, servicing a diverse client base that includes governments, institutions, corporations, and individuals.
MSIM needed to design and implement a highly-available execution management system (EMS) integrated with an in-house order management system (OMS) supporting equities, FX, fixed income, and futures. Past methods used by MSIM were expensive and had failed to keep up with message volume. Thus, the firm needed a custom build to control message routing and write execution summaries.
The firm felt they lacked experience with FIX, the standard electronic communications protocol for the capital markets. Once MSIM discovered Connamara’s FIX expertise, they knew our team could meet their large-scale, regulatory, and complex integration requirements.
Connamara would need to work within MSIM’s organizational structure and collaborate with staff across their New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, London, Singapore, Pune, and Bangalore offices.
SOLUTION:
Connamara immediately began a joint effort with MSIM’s global team, working closely with the company’s Managing Director, Executive Director, and Global Head of Performance Attribution Technology.
To bridge the information gap and ease integration, MSIM onboarded a Connamarian engineer as a contractor to work on the OMS team while we worked on the EMS at Connamara.
Clear lines of communication were established by interfacing over an API for receiving and reporting messages, as MSIM managed the OMS internally. And as usual, Connamara Agile was deployed for transparency, continuous integration, and testing.
Mid-production, it was discovered that Connamara could only leverage ZeroMQ messaging technology if Kerberos Security was supported. Without missing a beat, Connamara engineers added Kerberos/GSSAPI security to ZeroMQ, czmq, and jzmq, and contributed them back as open source.
RESULT:
MSIM’s new in-house OMS/EMS system manages all execution flow without operational issues that plagued their original platform. This fully customizable Connamara build is less expensive than the company’s previous version, saving the company money in the long run.
MSIM re-engaged Connamara in 2017 in the wake of MiFID II to make their platform compliant with the new regulations. Connamara completed the updates in just six months.
“Working with Connamara was a smooth and enjoyable experience, and the Connamara team has deep expertise in capital markets. Our partnership, and the resulting platform, have been hugely successful.”
David Kim, Managing Director, Morgan Stanley Investment Management
