FISO Annual Meeting Poorly Attended; Marketing Effort Needed To Raise Cash, Membership

The fledgling Financial Information Standards Organization celebrated its first official year of existence at a sparsely- attended annual general meeting June 20th-21st in New York. The organization, while hurting for paid-up members, may nonetheless have hit upon a topic -- metering digital data feeds -- that could be the key to opening the checkbooks of major Wall Street firms.

Less than two dozen were on hand at an IBM Maiden Lane conference room to hear FISO chairman Tom Penney of Smith New Court review the past year. While FISO has "created an awareness and established a presence," he says, "we have not succeeded in gaining critical mass...to allow us to speak for the industry as a whole."

With annual dues of $5,000, FISO has succeeded in getting membership commitments from 25 organizations, but so far has only managed to bank the cash from 12 of them. The consensus solution, perhaps inspired by the IBM setting, is to turn technologists into marketers.

"We really must be able to demonstrate that we're capable of delivering things that are going to allow our lords and masters to derive some real benefit out of what we do here," says Penney. "Fundamentally it boils down to the process of selling, to actually pinpoint what those hot buttons are to allow people to sign checks."

While the questions like "data representation" and "abstract syntax notation" that are being tackled by some FISO subgroups hardly qualify as "hot buttons," the meeting decided to focus the efforts of its subgroup C -- which had a broad and ill-defined mission -- on the issue of metering digital feeds. This is seen as a mission which, if successful, could bring a significant near-term payoff to Wall Street firms.

At issue are mechanisms for monitoring the use of digital feeds that allow vendors to be adequately protected without placing large administrative burdens on users. The question is less one of price than it is one of accounting.

"It's not dollars -- this is what you should be charging me for it -- but just the way we have to keep track of it," says Russ Hovanec, manager of workstation development at Shearson Lehman Hutton and new chairman of FISO subgroup C. "Every firm is going to have to demonstrate that they can do it and what we're trying to do is kind of define what that model should look like."

Steve Bailey of Digital Equipment Corp. has been charged with drafting a model, which will be presented at a subgroup meeting in early August. What firms are looking for, says Hovanec, is a mechanism that "doesn't mean we have to have a staff of people watching all this stuff. It means that we can use the technology in a reasonable way and it doesn't create a lot of overhead to our own systems internally to be able to monitor."

Penney, meanwhile, argues that FISO should set its sights high and aim to raise $2 million in the next calendar year. With only $60,000 in the kitty to date, some members are privately suggesting that the group's dues structure is out of line. Instead of trying to squeeze $5,000 out of 400 members, they say, it makes more sense to get $100,000 each out of 20 by going to the very top information technology executives at the very largest firms.