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Articles from
July 2005
The Information Gap |
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As HP’s Treasurer for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, a region with approximately $32 billion of revenues in FY04, Sarah Jones is a demanding customer for the commercial banks that the company uses to handle its transactions across the region, and at least as demanding when it comes to investing the approximately $13 billion representing HP’s offshore cash portfolio. The HP Treasury team based in the UK is one of HP’s three shared service centers that handle global Treasury operations, and is specifically responsible for the provision of Treasury consulting across EMEA and for the daily cash management activities of approximately 250 legal entities in EMEA, Latin America and Canada.
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Money Managers Move SWIFTly to STP |
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More and cheaper connectivity choices and an increase in international investing are pushing smaller money managers toward increased STP automation.
Smaller asset managers – think at least a few ranks below Fidelity – once the missing link in straight-through trade processing – are now spoiled for choice in STP solutions. Services bureaus, SWIFT, order management system vendors, and custodians are pursuing their business, offering them relatively inexpensive ways to connect to counterparties and use standard messaging for automated trading and post-trade processing.
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Houston Firm AIMed to Cut Costs While Scaling Up |
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In 1999 AIM Investments in Houston, TX was facing renewal of its license for IBM's MQSI middleware. Instead, the investment firm chose to go with Microsoft BizTalk 2002 and SWIFTAlliance on Windows NT using MSMQ to extract messages from Thomson's Portia and transmit to SWIFT Network.
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Data and the Future of Trading |
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Capital markets firms are facing a data explosion that requires them to change the way they plan and implement their technology. Algorithmic trading, which accounts for just 10 percent of current order flow, has driven up the volume of pricing data faster than analysts can track it. The TABB Group estimates algorithmic trading will account for 60 to 70 percent of total flow within a few years, and cites estimates that firms may have to accommodate 130,000 messages per second. The speed of trading and the growth of cross-asset class trading are placing a stress on reference data
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Financial Industry's Triple Challenge |
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Financial firms have been facing a trifecta of challenges in recent years as they find they have to increase efficiency, reign in costs, and cope with a growing list of regulatory demands. All this must be done while serving a customer base that increasingly expects high levels of customer service and personalized attention.
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LaSalle’s Automated Corporate Actions Save Time And Money |
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Back in 2000, LaSalle Bank’s Global Securities and Trust Services group started the hunt for a way to automate corporate action processing – the splits, buy-backs, warrants, dividends, and payouts from class action lawsuits. Market data feeds, which provide up-to-the-second information on price and volumes, often don’t carry corporate actions that may require shareholders to respond to offers by certain deadlines.
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Citigroup’s Real-Time, Web-Based Answer to Pre-Trade Analytics |
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Think of it as Consumer Reports for portfolio managers. In little more than a year, Citigroup has acquired more than 100 customers for its Best Execution Consulting Services (BECS), which offers handsome graphic portrayals to show an individual asset manager how the services from his broker compare with what his competitors get from that same broker or from the universe of brokers.
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Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and C# Keep Ahead of Fast Moving Trade Data |
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“It’s an arms race.”
That’s how Dr. James Holt describes the effort that Chicago-based Townsend Analytics, Ltd. confronts in keeping ahead of the fast-growing volumes of quotes and messages coming from exchanges, ECNs, and other liquidity providers. Customers of the firm’s RealTick® market data, analysis, and direct access trading platform include retail investors, day traders, hedge funds, money managers, mutual funds and sell-side broker dealers. It is a client base that has little tolerance for slow performance. Many customers, who are across the United States and in 93 other countries and territories, notice immediately if the company provides less than sub-second response time.
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Bank Uses Windows To Sign On To UNIX Applications |
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“We are primarily a Windows shop,” said an IT analyst at a federal financial institution whose rules don’t permit product endorsements. But the bank does have a few UNIX applications running two applications that allow outside banks to connect to it. To control the complete environment, it relies on software from Vintela. Vintela lets users manage Linux and late last year Microsoft made an investment in the company. It might be Microsoft’s first investment in Linux, and it came in response to customers, explained Kiril Tatarinov.
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New Addition Makes BizTalk More Rapid with FIX |
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Rapid Addition, a SWIFT partner in London, is making BizTalk work faster with FIX messages while preserving the order of message flow – essentials in financial services. But that’s just the beginning, said Kevin Houstoun, director of Rapid Addition, chairman of the FIX technology committee, and a consultant to several major banks.
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The Benefit of Selling Benefits Packages |
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Property and casualty (P&C) insurance agencies that expand into benefits are finding that the new business line not only increases total revenue, it brings the agency into a tighter relationship with its clients.
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Customer Service Begins with the Customer Experience |
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Retail banks in the United States spend several hundred billion dollars “servicing” their clients – that’s hundreds of dollars spent on every customer. Now that’s a lot service! But is it fostering loyalty, or addressing the symptoms and missing the problems? A key question around “service” is how the industry realizes more value from such a significant investment.
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Cantor’s New FinanceFone Makes Stock Watchers More Mobile |
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More rude behavior is on the way.
To the annoying practice of people talking on cell phones while they are out to lunch with friends, or texting during meetings, you can now add FinanceFone from Cantor Fitzgerald. With FinanceFone, active traders will find another reason to ignore what is going on around them – they will be checking market quotes and news.
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