090103

Sophis announced a partnership agreement with German financial consultancy d-fine, which recently completed a certification program with the French position keeping, risk management, and operations software vendor. The d-fine agreement is Sophis’ first in Germany.

Charles River Development has joined with Spear, Leeds & Kellogg (SLK) to establish a new FIX-based interface between the Charles River Investment Management System (IMS) and SLK’s RediPlus for joint clients. Officials say this eliminates the need for multiple points of trade data entry, and should reduce keypunch errors and increase operational efficiencies. The IMS is a front- and middle-office suite for portfolio management (Charles River Manager), order management (Charles River Trader), and real-time compliance (Charles River Compliance). RediPlus is a market-access tool with more than 8,500 users that provides direct access to all major U.S. and European sources of liquidity for equities, options, and electronically traded futures, and also includes quotes, news, charts, order management, and position management. The jointly developed interface is available to users of Charles River IMS version 6 and the recently released version 7.1.

Axiom Global Trading, a New York based integrator and provider of electronic trading technology and institutional services, has added TradeTek to their list of preferred order execution systems, officials announced. The TradeTek system will be offered to AXIOM Global Trading clients as of Sept. 1, and will include: order routing to all ECNs, primary and regional exchanges, a proprietary multiple-account-manager GUI and advanced order-handling functions, such as random reserve orders.

ADP Wilco, a subsidiary of Automatic Data Processing, released version 5 of its international securities processing platform, Gloss, available in Q3 2003. The new release will provide a range of additional features, including extended instrument coverage and market connectivity, enhanced data access and improved support for centralized around-the-clock real-time processing. The instrument coverage in Gloss v.5 adds in-depth support for international fixed income, repo and stock lending operations. This incorporates support for index-rate and variable-rate repos, as well as a range of Japanese repo types, including Shin Gensaki and Genkin Tampo. Gloss is now fully enabled for the upcoming Swift SRG mandatory changes in November 2003, and also enabled for connectivity to Euroclear via both the Radianz and SwiftNet networks. In addition, Gloss now supports enhanced messaging to Crest for both stock lending and unmatched/alleged reporting. The new Gloss release will include standardised feeds for users to access data, minimizing the need for customer-specific reports, officials say. Increased support for global processing will enable a single instance of Gloss to support around-the-clock real-time processing for operations based across multiple time zones, each of which can be managed simultaneously.

Danske Bank has become the 25th Dealer to join the BondVision dealer-to-client bond trading platform. Danske Bank is the first Nordic Dealer on the system, and signals the strategy of BondVision and the MTS Group to expand into the Nordic markets and to introduce the trading of non-euro denominated securities, officials say. Clients access and trade on BondVision free of charge.

SunGard Trading Systems has integrated the Pink Sheets Electronic Quotation System (EQS) (TTW, June 9) with its Brass trade order management system (OMS), officials said last week. This enhancement will allow Brass customers to obtain real-time pricing in Pink Sheets quoted securities as well as provide them with electronic drop copies of executions, negotiated via the Pink Link messaging service, delivered directly into the Brass system. In the past, users were forced to manually key Pink Sheet trades into the Brass system because a medium for direct order delivery did not exist. As a result of the integration, users will now be able to not only monitor Pink Sheet quotes but also automatically update and manage all executed trades directly from their Brass system. Changing from test to production mode took less than a day in early August, officials said.