Financial technology vendor Cogent Consulting LLC is bucking the trend on Wall Street, expanding staff and product/service offerings, and moving into larger offices.
Cogent, systems for managing commissions used to pay for trade execution and research, helps institutional brokerage firms and money managers save money and become more productive.
“Business is growing,” says Robin Hodgkins, president and founder. “We have developed ways to use web-based technology to automate the reporting of critical information on commissions. This consolidates processes that were underutilized or manually intensive, and replaces incompatible systems that prevent management from getting a clear picture of counter-party risk, relationships, research values, and productivity. As our products are accessible through the web, there’s nothing to install, reducing costs even further.”
Hodgkins estimates that Cogent products typically save clients 50-75% of the cost of doing it themselves. Cogent’s products are also continually updated, relieving the client from having to staff that activity.
One of Cogent’s best-sellers is CSA Trak™ “Cloud,” which enables brokerage firms to easily set up online commission sharing arrangements with clients. These accounts enable buy side investors to manage and monitor the separate payment of commissions for trading and for research across all their brokers, rather than having to log in to individual broker systems and manually compile balances for all of them.
Commensurate with strong demand, Cogent has added five new staff positions – two developers, and one each in quality assurance, customer service and sales, upping the total number of employees to 30.
Among the new additions: Liam McCarthy, who has two decades of experience selling technology solutions to Fortune 500/Global 2000 companies, was named Senior Account Executive, responsible for managing relationships with existing clients and new clients He reports to Thomas Smith, Director of Sales.
Cogent also has launched a “Continuity Service” to help firms using orphaned technology similar to Cogent’s existing products. “Due to the recession, a number of competitors are cutting back on support and development, or just ceasing product marketing,” says Hodgkins.
For buy or sell side firms where a vendor is no longer supporting or enhancing a product or service, Cogent will provide reduced or no-cost transfer of existing data and implementation of Cogent’s equivalent module. Cogent also will reduce its first year annual licensing fee if the customer has already paid the previous vendor.
To accommodate its increased staff and offerings, Cogent has moved into larger offices at 30 Maple Street in downtown Summit, N.J.
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