We report on experience that we made in the Trading room InteGRation Architecture project (Tigra). Tigra developed a distributed system architecture for integrating different financial front-office trading applications with middle- and back-office applications. We discuss the detailed requirements that led us to adopt a judicious combination of object-oriented middleware and markup languages. In this combination an object request broker implements reliable trade data transport. Markup languages, particularlyt he eXtensible Markup Language (XML), are used to address semantic data integration problems. We show that the strengths of middleware and markup languages are complementary and discuss the synergies yielded by deploying middleware and markup.