The year was 1991. Steve Levy had just founded Boston-based Macgregor, a trade order management system for institutional investors, but he lacked the one thing that experts consider crucial to the success of any start-up: customers. Ray Killian, chief of Investment Technology Group, an institutional brokerage house, introduced Levy to a pal of his at IBM’s pension fund. The computer maker became Macgregor’s client -- its second.
“I was Steve’s first salesman, but he still hasn’t paid me a commission,” jokes Killian, 67.
Perhaps he can wrest that commission from Levy now: Last month ITG acquired Macgregor for $230 million in a hotly contested auction.
“We’ve known Ray a very long time, and that was clearly a material factor in helping us make our decision,” says the 41-year-old Levy, who will stay on to run Macgregor as a unit of ITG.
Killian, who returned as ITG’s CEO last September after a couple of years off from the firm he co-founded, is betting that integrating Macgregor’s front-end system with ITG’s analytics and trade execution platforms -- notably, its Posit crossing network -- will attract more customers to both businesses.
He’s quick to reassure buy-side traders, however, that integrating the systems won’t mean that ITG gives preference to its own trade-execution systems.
“We’ve always been a broker-neutral solution,” says Killian. “We will take the same attitude with the Macgregor system. Our products have to stand on their own. If clients don’t want to link with them, that’s fine. We will link to whatever destinations our clients want.”
