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Note: See related articles on pages 24, 26, 27 and 28.
After Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy in September 2008, Barclays Capital jumped at the opportunity to build out its electronic trading presence in the U.S., acquiring Lehman's North American assets and quickly getting to work integrating the firms' electronic trading capabilities. Frank Troise, Barclays' head of global equities electronic trading products and the former managing director and head of U.S. equities electronic trading products at Lehman, explains that the newly combined team evaluated both firms' electronic trading platforms in the fourth quarter of 2008 and now is moving to roll out the resulting products and services.
"We are up and running globally across all regions," Troise reports. "The legacy Lehman platform is running in the U.S., while Europe and Asia are running on the legacy Barclays Capital platforms."
According to Brian Fagen, cohead of liquid market sales, Americas, at Barclays Capital, the firm has been migrating legacy Barclays clients in the U.S. onto the Lehman platform. "In the U.S. the Lehman equities business was significantly more built-out and broader across products than Barclays Capital, which made the decision to go with the Lehman Brothers platform relatively simple," explains Fagen, who previously served as managing director and head of program trading and electronic trading sales at Lehman Brothers.
But, Fagen adds, "In the other regions it was not as clear. We lost the...