It’s a common conundrum. Tech leaders at financial organizations often grapple with the decision of whether to build trading and risk systems in-house, or turn to vendors with off-the-shelf products that meet their requirements. 

Traditionally, tier one sell-side institutions–the ones with access to the largest IT budgets–have opted to build technology internally to maintain full control over their systems. However, keeping this control is expensive, both in terms of time and the prohibitively high cost of resources. Indeed, this high price tag can make the  “build approach” nothing short of impractical for those smaller firms that simply can’t afford to put their own systems in place. 

As a result of this, numerous firms focused on attaining more predictable IT costs are electing to buy trading and risk technology from a specialized provider.

In this article, Rob Garfield, Global Head of Product Marketing describes the various types of 3rd party solutions providers and the benefits and drawbacks of each.