Software application development platform Genesis Global has launched new features to make it much quicker for developers to create new products as buy, build and integrate replaces buy versus build in financial services.

Coalition Greenwich said in its report, Top Market Structure Trends to Watch in 2024, that the “buy, build and integrate” approach has gained traction as financial firms combine pre-built platforms with proprietary technology systems. The consultancy said this gives firms greater control, flexibility and adaptability while reducing development time and costs.

“However, customization and development efforts require resources, expertise and collaboration with vendors,” added Coalition Greenwich. “Therefore, factors such as integration ease and reliability of these hybrid systems are gaining more importance, while successful providers prioritize ease-of-use, scalability, customization, comprehensive training, and high-quality support.”

Ease-of-use, scalability, customization, comprehensive training, and high-quality support are important features of the new version 8 of the Genesis platform (G8), according to Stephen Murphy, chief executive and cofounder of Genesis Global. He told Markets Media that the firm has been working closely with its strategic investors and platform users to accelerate the ability of developers to build applications with Genesis.

Murphy said: “Since we took on our strategic investors, our big journey for the last year and a half has been delivering the technology for developer enablement at scale. We knew we had great technology and a great platform but, for example, we didn’t have great training material or notes for our new releases.”

In July 2022 Bank of America, BNY Mellon and Citi invested $20m in Genesis Global. Banks, asset managers and trading infrastructure providers use Genesis and its platform to develop new software, enhance legacy technology systems and replace end-user computing and manual processes with enterprise-quality solutions.

“We have put a lot of tooling around the platform to allow developers to build applications even quicker,” he added. “We’ve been talking to our strategic investors, as well as our platform clients, to attack their biggest pain points.”

For example, the new release includes Genesis Create,  a web-based tool to start projects and get new applications running in minutes. Business analysts have a code-free way to define business objects and views and developers can set up real-time data aggregations, create database queries and specify user interface (UI) foundations.

“Projects which would normally take three hours to five hours to set up can be done in 15 minutes,” said Murphy.

Genesis View is an artificial intelligence-based tool that accelerates the development of user interfaces. Murphy explained that users can take a screenshot of a user interface, which could be in a legacy application, and Genesis View produces the code to add screens and update interface attributes throughout an application.

“There is a lack of UI resources and they are expensive,” added Murphy. “Genesis Create and Genesis View takes development from a few hours or a day, down to about 20 minutes.”

In addition, the new release contains Genesis Marketplace, a library of pre-built templates which developers can use off-the-shelf. Two templates have been put into Marketplace and Murphy expects more will be  added each month. Genesis is in discussions with a number of consultancies who could put their own templates into  Marketplace.

The new release also includes desktop interoperability to help developers embed interoperability into applications and desktop environments as Murphy said Genesis has completed a huge amount of integrations with a variety of technologies, industry vendors and legacy databases.

“If you put all those things together, your developers are supercharged,” said Murphy.

For example, Genesis built a new platform for Neptune, which distributes fixed income data via one billion daily messages, in just six months. Murphy estimated that the new tools would have decreased that time by approximately 80%.

“We’re seeing a lot of opportunity in fixed income and across the buy side and hedge fund space,” he added.

Genesis is also seeing demand from clients to use AI within the applications they are building on Genesis, which Murphy said is easy to do and within guard rails.

Nikhil Joshi, global head of markets technology at Citi, said in a statement: “We are impressed by both the speed with which the Genesis platform can deliver new, full-stack applications and its ability to handle a diverse set of financial business requirements.”

Disrupting pricing

Software is typically sold on a subscription basis but Murphy said Genesis is disrupting this model by charging based on consumption. Genesis Sandbox is being launched, which provides free, on-demand platform trials to qualified users.  The new usage-based pricing system helps firms correlate costs to the value they receive according to Genesis.

“We want to supercharge developers so they can be more effective and efficient, and remove any pricing friction,” said Murphy

He continued that two of the firm’s largest clients are already discussing Genesis being part of their strategic roadmap for the next five to 10 years of their digital transformation.

“We are seeing more investment, especially with regulatory changes, to be able to have a platform that can adapt quickly,” he added. “This year is all about developer adoption across the industry.”