| November 8, 2004 | ||
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| FRONT PAGE: DATA DISPLAY & ANALYTICS
BNP Tries Traderforce Update BNP Paribas is beta testing a new release of the Traderforce front-end data display from French data vendor Financial Innovative Technology that adds new data sources and makes the product easier to use. Pierre Laborie, head of marketing at Traderforce, says the new software release, version 9, will be launched before the end of November. He says BNP is also testing the release at its BCapital private banking business in Paris, and that the vendor currently has other beta tests underway at other, unnamed clients. Traderforce consists of three product lines: Premium, a full, one size-fits-all data screen aimed at traders and portfolio managers; Monitor, a more customizable version that can tailor data sets specifically for specialist off-trading floor users and private banking staff; and Screener, which provides a more limited data set of data, charts and news for salespeople, advisors and middle- and back-office staff. BCapital is testing Traderforce Premium, while the bank is testing a mix of Premium and Monitor. The software upgrade applies to all three products. André Kelekis, head of market data projects at BNP, says the bank is initially testing Traderforce over the Internet within its market data department. But in the second half of this month it will roll the product out to its business lines for testing, with plans to deploy it by year-end over the Radianz financial extranet rather than the Internet. BNP, an equity investor in FIT since last year, now has more than 400 positions of Traderforce installed, mainly in its asset management and private banking businesses in France, though about 40 positions are split between Luxembourg, Milan, Geneva and London, Kelekis says. These have mostly replaced Reuters Marketsheet, Reuters Market Monitor, GL Trade's GL Win workstation and Misys' Market Watch data system (now also owned by GL), he adds. Kelekis says the content additions in the new version are important. These include new exchange data from the Warsaw, Budapest and Prague exchanges via ComStock's XpressFeed, and equity-linked data such as corporate actions from FT Interactive Data. Kelekis says the additions are key because asset managers may have specialist portfolios and need data from certain emerging exchanges. BNP is also using the FTID data to provide corporate actions to corporate finance staff involved in merger and acquisitions business, he says. The vendor has also taken steps to make the product easier to navigate. For example, Traderforce Portal allows users to navigate through data sets in a separate browser and then export the required data into the main front end. The vendor has also created a way for users to search news stories on Traderforce without having to use country- or sector-specific keywords. Instead they click through menus of countries and sectors. Traderforce has more than 130 clients, mainly in private banking and asset management, though 29 percent are in banking and brokerage. "We are sure that before the end of the year, most clients will upgrade," Laborie says. Support for the old versions of Traderforce will be phased out three months after the launch of the new versions. Users can either choose to upgrade to the new versions when they log into the products, all of which are delivered on an ASP basis, by downloading a new Microsoft ActiveX component, or firms can manage global rollouts via their IT departments, Laborie says. The front ends are a mix of ActiveX and dynamic html, displayed via a Web browser. They use Java scripts, though not Java technology because FIT found Java was not the best programming language for delivering real-time data, Laborie says. |
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