Former Thomson Exec Eccleston Joins IMTrader as CEO

Pivot Solutions, a developer of trading systems based on instant messaging (IM) technology, announced the appointment last week of Louis Eccleston as chairman and chief executive officer, replacing the company's founder, Furqan Nazeeri.

Eccleston is noted for developing and enhancing some of the leading securities industry transaction and data platforms while in senior roles with Thomson Financial and Bloomberg. He said one of his tasks will be to foster the development of new applications for Boston-based Pivot's flagship IMTrader product. "Pivot is not only about messaging," Eccleston said in an interview. "It is a network of capabilities." The technology fosters "real-time collaboration," he said, and can be used to "take a conversation and then, using the FIX protocol, immediately convert that into a transaction."

Nazeeri left the company ten days ago. He no longer has a management role there and was unavailable for comment, according to a Pivot spokesperson. Pivot was founded in 2002 within Eze Castle Integration (ECI), where Nazeeri was CFO, and was spun off in 2004. It is funded by ECI and venture capital firms SoftBank Capital, Hudson Ventures and Draper Fisher Jurvetson Gotham Ventures.

Eccleston was a Bloomberg managing director for 14 years before joining Thomson, where he was most recently president of global sales, marketing and services, in 2002. He said his departure from Thomson was amicable and prompted largely by his desire to assume a senior management role with an emerging financial technology company, and Pivot was looking for an executive to accelerate its growth.

"I was really focused on where I could leverage and impact a company, the people and situation based on my 20-plus years of experience," Eccleston said. "I wanted to look at something that was about the future and where things are going. The idea of taking a new technology like instant messaging and making it compliant for the institutional world was very attractive."

Said Larry Tabb, founder and CEO of Westborough, Mass. research firm Tabb Group, "Pivot has some interesting technology, but I think they are looking for wider application and a more universal product. They are looking for Lou to be the driving force to make that happen."

Acceptance of IM technology among traders is spreading. Bloomberg and Reuters offer it in their networks, but Tabb said, "If you can expand IMTrader to have more market data and more content, then it becomes less of a communication channel and more of a content channel." Eccleston could also, given his credibility and contacts, help some firms overcome their reluctance to adopt IM because of security and compliance concerns.

Eccleston believes IM is capable of much more than what has been seen to date. For example, he sees Pivot forming partnerships with providers of desktop trading and market data platforms such as Thomson or FactSet Research Systems. "Our strategy for instant messaging is not about creating a desktop," he explained. "It is about enabling information to nourish desktops."