Business and technology solutions for trading firms

Increased volume. Interest rate variability. The evolution of electronic trading. More sophisticated customer demands. In an environment where milliseconds matter, any amount of downtime can have a significant—and potentially devastating—financial impact.

When milliseconds matter, can you deliver?

With the financial stake high and customers measuring trading firms on performance and uptime, your organization must be able to demonstrate that its operations are reliable, timely, precise, and capable of the volume in any scenario.

Today, your firm must deliver unfaltering performance during trading periods while balancing a variety of other business objectives, including:

• Recognizing and responding quickly to market trends and customer needs
• Managing costs and profitability amid increased margin requirements
• Remaining competitive as industry consolidation continues
• Maintaining effective risk management practices
• Integrating data and operations efficiently with key partners
• Ensuring the right resources to enable growth

A trusted partner to trading firms.

When it comes to selecting a consulting partner, there is no substitute for experience.

West Monroe Partners brings industry knowledge and experience, gained through years of help leading trading firms to address key business issues. Our professionals have served in operational roles—for example—acting chief information officer—at trading firms for extended periods of time. And, we are one of only a handful of consulting firms granted associate membership in the Futures Industry Association.

We can help your firm:

• Ensure system availability by identifying and shoring up potential points of failure
• Maintain optimal system performance and enable growth by finding and eliminating system bottle necks
• Develop and test robust disaster recovery plans and procedures
• Establish effective decision support systems, including data warehouses, that pull data from various systems to provide clear and current reporting on key metrics, help recognize trends, and understand customers and customer behaviors better
• Select and implement packaged trading applications based on business needs
• Develop custom trading applications and processing servers
• Conduct operational analyses and identify opportunities for cost reduction in IT and other business processes; for example by eliminating excess telephony lines or converting paper statements to electronic distribution
• Integrate systems with partners; for example, building a new system to coordinate incoming trades with a European partner
• Improve your customer facing website and portal to strengthen business relationships and deliver information efficiently
• Implement customer relationship management strategies and systems to enable lead generation and improve quality of customer information
• Integrate operations following a merger or acquisition

An approach tailored to the way trading firms work.

One of the things that you will find different and refreshing is a collaborative approach that helps trading firms moving quickly to respond to the market and customer needs.

We think you’ll like our:

• Get-it-done attitude, with a commitment to addressing issues at your pace
• Holistic viewpoint and multidisciplinary expertise
• Approaches that are proven but with a dose of flexibility not typically available from larger firms
• Commitment to not only defining a solution, but to seeing it through to successful conclusion

Maintain your edge.

Maintaining your edge requires both sound strategy and flawless execution. West Monroe Partners can help you build a highly reliable operating environment. Fine tune your operations to meet your clients’ performance expectations. And, adapt quickly to market conditions and trends, while running efficiently to support today’s profitability goals.

We work with leaders in the trading industry:

ADM Investor Services
CME Group/Chicago Board of Trade
Cunningham Futures
Cunningham Trading Systems
Dorman Trading
E.M. Combs
Fortis Clearing Americas
Incapital
Kottke & Associates
R.J. O’Brien
Rosenthal Collins Group
TENCO
TransAct Futures

“Our network reliability has increased substantially. It went from a daily headache to something I never think about. This availability has given us the confidence to grow our business and to substantially increase the number of users, customers, and transactions on our systems.”

William Cunningham - CEO, Cunningham Futures

“West Monroe Partners has become a trusted partner, which is why after four years, we continue to look to their staff to provide their industry expertise and technical know-how on our most business critical initiatives.”

Gerry Corcoran - CEO, R.J.  O’Brien