The evolution of Genesis: vendor charts future course with latest release

In February 2022, low-code software application development provider Genesis Global received $200 million in a Series C funding round led by Tiger Global Management, with participation from Accel, GV (formerly Google Ventures), Illuminate Financial, Insight Partners, Salesforce Ventures, and Tribeca Early Stage Partners. That was followed five months later by $20 million in new investments from Bank of America, BNY Mellon, and Citi.

Now, the seeds of those investments are bearing fruit.

This week, Genesis will roll out Version 8 of its platform. While the release will offer new tools and services, it also marks a change in the vendor’s strategy to lure end-users from finance firms to the platform. On the product side, the release includes a new web-based tool called “Create” that aims to allow developers and business analysts to start projects and get applications running quickly. “View” is geared toward UI/UX developers to help them design and edit user interfaces. “Marketplace”—as the name would suggest—is a library within the Genesis platform that provides pre-built templates, components, and solutions.

Perhaps more interestingly, though, is the launch of the Genesis Sandbox, a free, on-demand platform that allows “qualified users”—meaning financial services firms—a place to trial and test the platform, including Create and View. This also includes the release of the Genesis Academy, which provides training materials, how-to videos, documentation resources, and a certification program.

On top of these offerings, the vendor is also experimenting with a new “variable pricing” model. As Stephen Murphy, co-founder and CEO of Genesis puts it, the company will give developers “a number of months for free” to play around with the platform, and then there will be “a nominal” fee for support. From there, as users expand into testing and production environments, they will be charged based on the amount of virtual central processing units (vCPUs) they use.

“Where we’re going to capture the value and where we want our clients to see the value is you’ll only pay when you go into run-time, either in a test environment or production,” Murphy tells WatersTechnology. “You only start getting charged when you really see the value of it. What we’ve done is, when we looked at the pricing, we looked at the prices that we are charging when we used to do point by point by point by point, and some of our clients found that to be a challenge because they didn’t know how to re-scale with us—‘I’m paying this, but what do I pay for this and what would I pay for this?’”

As of May 31, Genesis was unable to provide specifics about what a “nominal” fee would be or how the tiered pricing would work. But Murphy insists that the pricing model will be “explainable and transparent”.

“When we will charge them, you do that for X-number of months, as soon as you say, ‘This is really important, I want to get more support from Genesis even though I’m not in a test or production environment,’ that’s when we have a platform license based on [a per developer model] for a nominal fee and premier support—again, nominal,” Murphy emphasizes. “But at some point, procurement will have to get involved—the head of trading doesn’t put their credit card down. We’re going to have very clear pricing on the website [that will say] this type of application, this amount of vCPUs, this tiered price band [will cost this much]. It will be very transparent.”

He continues: “Right now, we’re going back to clients and looking at the tiers they’re in so we can make it explainable and transparent. We know what the bands are—0–10, 10–50, 50 on up—but we’re just working through what is the actual price for those things.”

The goal for these releases is clear: While Genesis has announced some major wins and backers, the vendor wants to put the platform in the hands of more developers in the hopes that they will toy around with it, build some applications for company-specific challenges, like the results, and then become paying customers.

A winning message?

Nikhil Joshi has been at Citi for almost two decades, where he currently serves as the bank’s global head of markets technology. He tells WatersTechnology that Genesis is “a go-to partner” for some of its most innovative projects.

“We are impressed by both the speed with which the Genesis platform can deliver new, full-stack applications, and its ability to handle a diverse set of financial business requirements,” Joshi tells WatersTechnology.

Ben Cohen is the head of data at Neptune Networks, an electronic axe distribution network for the bond market. After launching in 2015 using Etrading Software’s execution management system, in 2022, Neptune signed on with Genesis to rebuild the platform from scratch. Cohen tells WatersTechnology that they went with Genesis because the company was low-code and could stand the new platform up quickly. 

He notes that Genesis being “financial-services grade” was a major decider in Genesis winning the RFP, as well as its API data delivery mechanism and its security protocols.

“We process a lot of data for fixed income and they were able to build a system that was solid and delivered everything we needed for our clients,” he says. “The idea of it being a focus on financial services means that they have a lot of the building blocks already in place—for example, an understanding of the FIX protocol. FIX is widely used in financial services; if you’re outside of finance, it might make no sense to you. And those pieces are available relatively off the shelf.”

He continues: “Security is a big one because financial services have very strict rules around security and authentication. As product managers we could focus on building the product we wanted with the knowledge  that it would be financial-services grade; this wasn't just some web app that we stood up in our basement.”

Citi, which is a strategic partner and investor in Genesis, and Neptune are part of the converted, but with this new pricing model and sandbox offering, in addition to Create and View, the vendor is looking to draw in more end-users, rather than big, headline-grabbing projects like the one announced with collateralized loan obligation (CLO) trading platform provider Octaura.

Murphy points to the prevalence of spreadsheet usage in the capital markets and banks’ desires to rid themselves of these largely ungoverned databases as examples of the new tools offered with this release. With Create, a user can upload a spreadsheet in about 10–15 minutes and start playing around with the same data schemas used in the spreadsheet, but written in Genesis code.

“There are a lot of savvy business analysts who have got some level of technical expertise,” Murphy says. “If they could be empowered to build or start to seed an application extremely quickly, that would be really powerful. And for a junior developer, there are a lot of mechanics that make our applications work that we abstract. So, Create was another way to do another level of abstraction, but these junior developers or business analysts can learn the platform very, very quickly.”

As for View, Murphy notes that UI and UX developers are “very hard to come by and very expensive”. View uses generative artificial intelligence to build Genesis code within the platform to speed up the time it takes developers to change a system’s look and feel.

Through View, a user can upload a UI/UX created in, for example, design tool Figma (among other third-party platforms), a legacy system, Excel, or just something that was designed as a graphic, and the Genesis AI will scan the instructions and produce the code to change the look and feel of the system. In some cases, says Murphy, it will give 100% of what you’re looking for; in other cases, it will give you a base code that will get a developer 80% of the way toward what they want, and then a dev can go in and manually make adjustments.

Murphy says the key is that the code is clean and easy for even low-level developers or analysts to understand and deploy.

“If you look at something like AI, a lot of CTOs we’ve been talking to say that they can [use AI to] generate more spaghetti code more quickly, but it’s still spaghetti code. They don’t want bad code built quicker; they want high-quality and high-performance code.”

Murphy adds that Genesis is cloud agnostic—“we can run [our services] on our cloud, your private cloud, or on prem”—and that the platform offers improved FDC3 support, including intents and channels workflows. Out of the box, the platform “will spit out FDC3 messages,” and it can work within the containers of interoperability vendors Interop.io and OpenFin.

Finally, while Genesis is still firmly entrenched in the low-code/no-code movement, Murphy says that going forward the vendor will position itself on the merits of its speed to go-live, the fact that the company is solely focused on finance, and AI.

“We’re moving away from low-code because, unfortunately, low-code and no code have had a bit of a bad rap within the industry because it was over-promised, and then it got to our industry and [users] were like, ‘You’re not going to replace these complicated, finance-specific applications [with generic low-code offerings].’ But we are built specifically for finance,” he says. “We’re going to [market with an] advanced application platform with low-code and AI. That’s going to be the new position of the technology.”