TS Imagine has acquired PrimeOne, a provider of operational risk management solutions for the prime brokerage industry, from S&P Global, according to CEO Rob Flatley.
“I am fortunate to be able to reunite with the PrimeOne team at a perfect time for TS Imagine,” he told Traders Magazine.
The combined team will operate under the TS Imagine brand, and global headquarters will remain in New York. EJ Liotta, leader of PrimeOne, will join TS Imagine’s executive team.
PrimeOne was founded by Flatley in 2011, as part of CoreOne Technologies. He then sold CoreOne and its four core products, RegOne, DeltaOne, VistaOne and PrimeOne, to IHS Markit in 2015. In 2022, S&P Global and IHS Markit completed their approximately $140bn merger, and PrimeOne’s products became part of S&P Global Market Intelligence.
Flatley formed TS Imagine following the merger of TradingScreen and Imagine Software in 2021.
TS Imagine innovates by drawing on nearly thirty years’ experience serving the world’s most sophisticated financial institutions through changing markets and shifting regulatory landscapes.
The Company delivers a SaaS platform for integrated electronic front-office trading, portfolio management, and financial risk management tools to the buy-side and sell-side.
“We are well-positioned with large institutional clients, on both the buy-side and the sell-side, for cross-asset class electronic trading, and cross-asset class financial risk management,” Flatley said.
“The financing business is adjacent to the markets currently served by TS Imagine. For firms that use leverage, trading and financing are inextricably linked. Their trading flows will follow where they finance,” he said.
Flatley said that the hardest part about setting up financing technology is the actual integration with risk management and the margin systems: “that’s where a lot of people might get into trouble”.
PrimeOne’s platform offers key services such as stock borrowing, lending, and margin management, which will complement TS Imagine’s existing technology.
The acquisition will allow TS Imagine clients to streamline workflows and improve operational efficiency.
When Flatley bought TradingScreen and Imagine Software, he realized that he’d “love to buy PrimeOne back.
“I felt like we had two amazing pieces of a puzzle, but there was a third piece where we could go in and really help firms deliver what they need faster, and also do that with zero operational and integration risk,” he commented.
The integration of PrimeOne’s tools with TS Imagine’s RiskSmart platform aims to enhance real-time risk monitoring by leveraging PrimeOne’s operational and financing data. Additionally, PrimeOne’s expertise in swaps will support the expansion of TS Imagine’s TradeSmart OEMS into swaps.
The acquisition creates several opportunities in product integration, product development and cross-selling.
According to Flatley, the market has expressed a desire for a single solution with RiskSmart quality real-time analytics paired with the robust prime brokerage infrastructure of PrimeOne.
“There are not that many systems where the buy-side and the sell-side can actually use the same risk management system,” Flatley said.
In addition, PrimeOne’s expertise in swaps will be integrated with TS Imagine’s TradeSmart OEMS, paving the way for electronification and automation of the swaps market.
The current state of electronification in the swaps market is “pretty weak”, according to Flatley. “When you want to go out and price a swap, it’s almost done exclusively on chat and email,” he said.
PrimeOne’s technology electronifies the equity terms for the swap and the financing terms, so the buy-side and the sell-side have the same rule book in terms of how they’re going to manage their exposure, Flatley said.
“We’ve electronified the fixed income market using electronic RFQs, we’ll take the same approach in the swaps market,” he said.
Commenting on the impact of the greater electronification in the swaps market, Flatley said: “The buy-side will save money, because today that work is analog and it’s not that efficient.”
In addition, Flatley thinks that firms will be able to get in and out of positions a lot easier with fewer error prone operations.
“It’s a good performance enhancer as well. You get the best inventory management relative to the exposure that you’re trying to achieve,” he added.
