It’s been nearly three years since Morgan Stanley first launched their ‘game changing’ (in cost, team size and scope) Matrix single dealer platform.
Although Caplin weren’t involved in the project, it’s interesting nonetheless to understand who were the User eXperience (UX) design consultants behind the innovative platforms vision – as distinct from the technical delivery and build team consultants.
From what we can see, RMA-Consulting together with Adobe Consulting were responsible for the UX design of the project, and Matrix appears on the RMA website, where they state their involvement as:
We created a visual and intuitive interface that integrates real-time pricing with rich multimedia and provides users who are more familiar with traditional trading systems with a game-changing experience
The user experience and architectural innovation delivered through the partnership of Adobe and RMA resulted in the Matrix project winning the 2010 P&L award for innovation
So it seems that while RMA and Adobe were the UX designers, others were involved in the build and implementation, although some three years down the road, performance optimisations are still being made to the platform.
Given that the world is moving to HTML5, an interesting question to ask, is whether Flex (being a plug-in technology) would be selected again, were such an ambitious and expensive project (reports that costs are hovering around $100mln and counting) to be commissioned today?
Previous Caplin coverage here and Caplin HTML5 white paper here
