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CEO CHAT: TORA’s Dykes Talks About TCO and Future Plans

Traders Magazine Online News, June 29, 2017

John D'Antona Jr.

The U.S. equity market is ripe with vendors and solutions to almost every conceivable trading problem.

But how does a firm with overseas chutzpah make it here in the U.S.?

Robert Dykes

In a conversation with Traders Magazine, TORA’s Chief Executive Officer Robert Dykes discusses his strategy for building his business here and how his firm lowers the total cost of ownership (TCO) for his order and execution management system (EMS) technology.

Traders Magazine: TORA is a well-known EMS player in Asia but less so here in the US. What is the strategy for building out your business here? 

Robert Dykes: TORA has been in the EMS space for the last 13 years, and as you mention our focus for most of that time was on Asia where we’ve grown to become one of the top providers in the space. We decided a few years ago that the timing was right for our business to expand globally, but to break into mature markets such as North America and Europe we knew we’d need a truly differentiated product.

That’s why we’ve spent the last couple of years building our own full featured OMS to sit on top of our existing EMS, which makes us one of the very few firms in the industry to have a truly integrated, organically developed OEMS system rather than a stitched together hodgepodge of separate systems. With that in place, we’ve been working to build out the team over the last six months – adding senior sales, business development and support staff in the US and Europe – and now working on our ground game to put the strategy into action.

TM: How is that working out? That sounds like the pitch several of the OMS and EMS vendors give? 

Dykes: I don’t disagree that people have been selling the idea of an OEMS for many years now, but ask most any buy sider and they will tell you that’s it’s almost entirely marketing hype. Combining systems through mergers and acquisitions is incredibly hard, and invariably what happens is that the “integration” is largely cosmetic and non-existent on the back end, which leads to clunky performance, heavy infrastructure requirements and duplicative costs. We in many ways benefitted from a second mover advantage, which allowed us to develop a superior product from the ground up, at a much lower total cost of ownership to clients than the vast majority of our peers.

TM: Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is an issue that we hear more and more about, with firms approaching it from different angles. How are you going about helping the buy side reduce it?

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