SunGard's  Shefi  Starts STP Venture

Hagay Shefi--a former SunGard executive who built Mint Communications into a leading middleware company for the capital markets--is at it again. Shefi left SunGard twice in his career-in 1997 Shefi was running SunGard's capital markets and derivatives risk management business, left to introduce Mint, an Israeli company into the United States. In March 1999, Shefi sold Mint to Sungard, and rejoined the company. Then, at the end of last year, he left again to recharge his batteries.

Shefi's new venture, GoldTier Technologies--a New Jersey-based start up--is assembling a small team of developers to focus on building STP and T+1 solutions for broker-dealers and asset managers. The company will be announced in late summer and at that time Sheffi will reveal the names of developers and other associates who are joining him from his previous companies.

Eyeing an SIA estimate that about $8 billion will be spent on T+1 over the next three years, Shefi concluded, "it's obviously a great space to be in." As co-founder and CEO of GoldTier, Shefi decided to work on a technology framework that will help brokers and portfolio managers to facilitate trade processing. He is mainly targeting the middle-office and back-office applications, because there is a lot of commonality among disparate systems. "You see that every application has to deal with reference data and they have reconciliation engines and matching engines and a lot of manipulation of data that cannot be shared across applications," he says. Noting that the vast majority of the $8 billion earmarked for T+1 will be spent on internal integration problems as opposed to external connectivity, Sheffi says the frameworks are designed to build more concrete solutions for T+1 such as integrating applications or automating the confirmation process. "I'd like to go where the most human intervention exists, and where the pain is and reduce it," he says.