Goldman Sachs is set to ditch its secretive, proprietary approach to its trading strategies, offering clients access to in-house tools through an open source platform, according to the Wall Street Journal.
As part of a new technology strategy developed by chief information officer R Martin Chavez, the firm is preparing to share its 'secret sauce' such as databases that analyse markets and manage risk, says the WSJ.
This means that rather than clients asking Goldman to create investment strategies for them, hedge funds and others can access the bank's tools from their own desktops via a web-based platform and develop their own plans.
While this approach risks helping clients build their own trading systems for execution, Goldman is confident that users will instead return to it for that. In addition, the bank hopes that the move will strengthen ties with users, helping it to win other business from them.
The applications on offer are an extension of Goldman's internal software platform, Marquee. One of the first apps being piloted provides tools that allow smaller brokers to create and analyse equity-linked derivatives for retail clients.
The new, open approach contrasts with Goldman's previous attitude to its trading secrets. The firm aggressively pursued former programmer Sergey Aleynikov for stealing propriety HFT code.