The ability to innovate is severely restricted by the lack of unified data
and functionality across electronic venues
The markets are growing in complexity and this is accompanied by ever-changing business needs. However, the potential to deliver new functionality and innovations to the e-trading space is currently severely limited.

The data clutter and lack of unified logical data source means that, although the business requirements may be expressed in terms of their logical view, that requirement may be difficult or impossible to deliver because the tidy-up and ongoing maintenance overhead would be too great to ensure the resulting system was safely performing the new functions. For example, the ability to capture cross-market activity and automatically feed that back into intelligent rule strategies is severely hampered by the lack of unification of master and transactional data.

The ability to integrate with your in-house systems is restricted
The ability to use in-house GUI’s to manage electronic trading activity pop-ups and blotters is straightforward technically - but severely hampered by the lack of unification of market-specific inquiry data and state behaviour, which means in-house developers need to be aware of these nuances and either build their own abstraction, or expose the GUI to that logic – possibly tying themselves in to the existing technical implementations still further.

In addition, unified cross-market activity reporting is not easy with the separate market- specific connectivity implementations, because your in-house reporting system needs to capture the raw activity data and do its own unification and abstraction of that data if the reports are to be accurate. Again, this would bind your reporting system into the existing technical implementation.

Due to differences in cross-region technical implementations, it is also hard to enhance the system functionality to provide offerings for the same instrument class to customers on a 24-hour, follow-the-sun basis.