New Alliance May Expand Your Options

Tackling the options-trading markets, EGAR Technology, a New York-based financial-technology-systems provider, and HyperFeed (booth #1427), a managed-exchange platform-services provider, will announce their new strategic partnership.

The partnership is part of HyperFeed's alliance program, H!VE. The two companies will demonstrate how EGAR's Equity Trading Suite (ETS) interacts with HyperFeed's exchange information.

EGAR's ETS is an equity-options-trading and risk-management system, which supports traditional market-making and screen-based trading. It is part of the EGAR One suite of products, an equity-options-analytical, trading and risk-management system.

Previously marketed on its own, EGAR is now promoting HyperFeed as its exchange-information provider because the partnership will allow EGAR to better assist ETS clients with technical support, says Ravi Jain, EGAR's chief executive officer.

It will also provide fast service and complete data information, says Randy Deihs, vice president strategic alliance and partners at HyperFeed. "The synergies between HyperFeed's exchange-information offerings and EGAR's trading applications gives EGAR customers a competitive edge by providing some of the fastest exchange data and most complete options," he says.

Users of EGAR's ETS may still choose alternate-exchange-information providers, notes Jain. The partnership of ETS and HyperFeed will be marketed mostly to equity-options users at firms of all sizes.

EGAR is also announcing the recent U.S.-launch of its Limits Server, a real-time-limit and risk-control and monitoring system. "The Limits Server is unique because it serves as a consolidated repository of all information necessary for risk evaluation," says Jain.

The Limits Server manages market- and credit-risk limits across many trading desks and instruments, in real-time, enabling an institution to establish any business process of limits control it requires. It also serves as a consolidated repository of all information necessary for risk evaluation, says Jain. It supports all types of trading transactions, including: investment and credit operations, the real-time processing of information on security agreements, account balances, counterparts and market instruments, and the analysis of historical data.

The Limits Server has the flexibility of setting a variety of different limits, such as limits by issuers, product groups and country risk. It can automate e-mail messages sent to appropriate risk managers or credit officers, give warnings, block trades or override them, Jain says. It also provides risk-calculation methodologies, including credit equivalency, open position, delivery risk, stop-loss, diversification risk and Value at Risk (VaR).

"The advantage of this server is that it creates an enterprise-wide application that will run on top of multiple trading systems and consolidate limits across a wide range of products, integrating and consolidating across systems," says Jain. It allows trading limits to be edited or refined at any time, in any currency, and provides full reporting functions, he says.

EGAR Technology first developed the Limits Server for Alfa Bank, a Russian bank dealing in debt capital markets, last year. Alfa Bank implemented the Limits Server to consolidate risk and monitor limits for its fixed-income, foreign-exchange, equity- and derivatives-trading operations, says Jain.

"The issue of consolidated-limits management has been a problem for risk-management departments for the past couple of years, and most institutions have had limited success in solving it," said Jain. Some banks have built their own middleware systems to consolidate across trading systems and use risk-management systems to measure the risk. "But such implementations take a lot of resources, expense and time. EGAR's Limit Server solves this problem by offering an economical system that is easy to implement," he says.

The Limits Server comes in a generalized form, but EGAR can tailor it to individual clients by adding more features. Its target market base is large second-tier and mid-second-tier banks that do not have the capabilities to build their own in-house system, Jain says.

EGAR's Limit Server's competitors include: Reuter's Kredinet, SunGard's Credient and FNX Limited's Sierra Limits.