Brad Bailey, a research director within research and consultancy Celent’s capital markets division, says that Goldman’s move to open the Marquee platform represents a wider trend seen throughout the industry. “The more that you can build a platform out and add an ecosystem, where not only you but also your customers and other parties can build into it, that’s tremendous power,” he says. “It’s a fundamentally difficult problem to take all these pieces that have evolved over decades and put them together in a way that’s seamless. That’s the end-game, and it’s kind of a winner-takes-all scenario.”
While Goldman and other large investment banks and asset managers have the challenge of evolving legacy platforms to incorporate cloud-based services and APIs, fintech startups don’t offer the robust, institutional power of a Marquee or similar bank-run platforms.
“Goldman is looking at how their business is changing and how they think about their capital markets, how they think about principle fulfilment, and commissions, and that type of stuff, and they see that in terms of fullservice offerings. I think this is everywhere,” Bailey says. “Building natively in the cloud is a lot easier than tying together these systems, but these systems are really, really hard to make. That’s why people want them.”