Standard & Poor's Trading Systems Appoints New President; Bunyan: Our Commitment Is To Become A Major Player

After several years of struggling under the McGraw-Hill, Inc. umbrella, the Standard and Poor's Trading Systems unit seems on the verge of finding itself. Twelve months after a wrenching top-to- bottom face-lift (MTR, February 1987), S&PTS has a new president, some new products, several new joint marketing deals, and a new high- profile customer, the American Stock Exchange.

"One year ago [S&PTS] was primarily a provider of a wholesale data feed to a small number of organizations who were using a data feed for special applications," says John Bunyan, who took over as president last month after managing the unit's marketing effort for the past year. "Today we are a marketer of an integrated feed and software product line." And people have finally stopped calling it Monchik-Weber.

The latest feather in S&P's cap is a contract to provide its Stockmate quote service to the new trading room at the American Stock Exchange. The system has been installed and is in the final stages of quality assurance prior to full implementation at the end of the month. "We made a conscious decision to try getting out of the ticker business," says the Amex's Mark Smith. "It is our intention -- given good operating experience -- that we would expand our use of S&P" to retrofit the rest of the trading floor.

The Stockmate implementation combines Amex data directly from the trading floor with S&P Ticker III data from other markets in a customizable window display. In an ironic 180-degree reverse from current technological trends, S&P had to develop a digital-to-video converter to support the Amex's system of overhead monitors.

The Amex deal, along with new hardware agreements with Data General and Hewlett-Packard and a data-swapping arrangement with International Data Media, shows how far S&PTS has come since it was jolted last year by the abrupt cancellation its biggest customer, International Marketnet, L.P.

"While there was turbulence in the company associated with the cancellation of the Imnet project, the timing of the cancellation essentially coincided with the completion of S&P Ticker III as a feed," says Bunyan. "The Imnet relationship carried with it certain restrictions on what S&P Trading Systems might do with the feed. When Imnet went away, those restrictions went away, which, in effect, gave us the opportunity to take a product which had been created by customer-driven requirements, and take it out to the marketplace"

While S&PTS is best known for the 9600 bits/second Ticker III consolidated broadcast feed, other feeds are in the works for 1988. Bunyan won't elaborate, but at least one new feed is likely to result from S&P's agreement with London-based commodity quote vendor International Data Media (U.K.) Ltd. Another, unofficially known as "Ticker IV," will provide a 19.2 kilobits/second bandwidth.

The IDM "agreement in concept" calls for each firm to distribute the other's "offsetting complementary pricing information," says Marty Marion, S&PTS's senior director of business development. In other words, S&PTS will distribute IDM's worldwide futures data in North America, and IDM will distribute S&P's North American futures data elsewhere. The IDM feed contains data from more than a dozen futures exchanges in Europe and the Far East.

One problem S&PTS is contending with is its size. Too small to be a player on the scale of Quotron or ADP, the company is at the same time too large to be a niche vendor that the big boys can generally ignore. "Our commitment is to become a major player," insists Bunyan, but he doesn't say precisely what it means to be a major player or the benchmark he'll use to know when he gets there. "There's no way that I can answer that without providing a nice platform for embarrassment or saying too much about how we see ourselves," he says.

The company's strategy clearly isn't to make a massive capital investment in an attempt to duplicate a Quotron- or ADP-style network. Instead, it seems committed to a hardware-independent strategy combining software platforms and broadcast data delivery. Whether this will be sufficient to bring S&PTS to the $100 million revenue threshold or the 30,000 terminal count remains to be seen.

"We have begun a program which is designed to give customers a broad set of hardware choices for using our information," says Bunyan. The company recently announced new joint marketing programs with Data General and Hewlett-Packard, and already has software platforms available for Stratus and Charles River systems. A DEC pact is rumored to be in the works.

Among other new S&PTS product line enhancements:

A broadcast version of S&P Marketscope has been added to the Ticker III feed, allowing the entire Marketscope database to be resident on a customer host.

Ticker III now sports a delay-by-exchange feature that allows customers to receive some exchanges in real time and others on a delayed basis.

Satellite delivery of Ticker III is now available via Bonneville Telecommunications Co.

OMS Plus -- a "major revision" of the Infonet Options Monitor Service -- combines four services, the old OMS, PMS, FFS, and NEOS, and adds new graphics and statistics. (Pru-Bache is rumored to be a big customer for this service, and a source reports the firm recently began distributing Ticker III over its branch satellite system.)