Published on July 23, 2001 at Trading Technology Week,

a Risk-Waters publication.

Ex-Mint President Shefi Re-emerges With Goldtier

MT. LAUREL, N.J. - Former Mint president Hagay Shefi is now heading Goldtier, an STP and T+1 software vendor, as co-founder and CEO.

Shefi is known best for leading middleware vendor Mint to success in the late 1990s and eventually selling it to Sungard, which later renamed it Sungard Business Integration (TTW, March 15, 1999). Shefi stayed on after the sale as president of SBI but left Sungard in late 2000.

Shefi says he was hoping to recapture the startup atmosphere when he started Goldtier. He is looking to offer solutions "exactly where the bottlenecks are in the trading cycle."

A team of six developers and one systems architect are developing the Goldtier Application Platform, which houses multiple processing engines and GUIs in one package.

Specifically, the platform will consist of a reconciliation engine, a matching engine, a workflow management tool, a synchronization engine, a reference data reconciliation engine and a transaction management engine. All of the engines are proprietary.

On top of the processing engines, Goldtier will build several vertical applications geared toward the end user for a variety of trading functions. Shefi says the first application being built will look to resolve issues with static reference data.

Shefi says the Goldtier platform is more than just another middleware solution. He says Goldtier is much closer to the end user and that the platform will rest one step above the middleware level. Of the middleware vendors, Shefi says, "We’ll no doubt meet in the middle sometimes, but we are not competing directly with them. We are building a connectivity layer to connect to the middleware vendors right now."

"People want to see near immediate ROI with new technologies these days," he continues, explaining that it is difficult to quantify ROI with enabling technologies such as middleware. "I want to provide quantifiable results to show where you are saving on operational efficiencies."

He says Goldtier is in discussion with Omgeo and the Global Straight Through Processing Association about linking to those organization’s matching engines. Shefi says Goldtier is not a competitor to those utilities either as they are more focused on the business-to-business side of things, while Goldtier intends to focus strictly on internal efficiencies.

Goldtier has begun talks with several large firms on Wall Street about beta testing the platform, but Shefi says he wants to "take his time and do it right." He also says the company will probably open a sales office in Manhattan in early 2002, but for now, all development work will be done in Mt. Laurel, N.J.

Jed Hamilton