W-Trade Powers On With New Clients and Technology

Looking to plant its feet firmly in the slippery terra firma of a wireless world, W-Trade has signed up a number of high profile clients and forged ahead in the development of new technology for its wireless trading and banking applications. Along with Quick & Reilly, the firm is doing some work for Merrill Lynch, despite the fact that Merrill already has an agreement with Aether Technologies, a competitor. W-Trade has also added Symbian to the number of operating systems its wireless platform supports.

Pointing out the ease and speed with which W-Trade's wireless platform can be implemented, Donna Oliva, CEO, says that Quick & Reilly was up and running with wireless trading in only two months. "Something that our competitors don't have is a very robust core technology and application modules that are fully developed," Oliva says. "We're dealing with customizable products, so we are able to write the APIs and customize the application modules and link them together on a common technology platform so we can deploy the first version of a site within a week."

It is this very reason that W-Trade has found its way into the hallowed halls of Merrill Lynch. Quick to point out that Merrill already has a deal with another vendor to provide its customers wireless trading, she declines to speak about the work that her company is doing for them. "They already have a deal with someone for the trading piece which is why there is no trading today," she says. "I'm not authorized to speak further." Officials from Merrill did not return phone calls by press time.

The firm has also signed a deal with Hemscott.net, a U.K. portal with a widely used financial section, that will provide W-Trade's wireless products to the financial institutions included in the portal.

Separately, W-Trade has ported its wireless platform over to the Symbian operating system. Oliva says that the firm's intent has always been to provide wireless functionality to as many types of devices and networks, and the addition of the Symbian OS is only another step toward that. The Symbian operating system, a competitor to the Palm OS, is beginning to find its way onto numerous wireless Web phones from the likes of Nokia and Ericsson.

"From the very beginning, we have had a commitment to support the largest number of wireless devices and wireless data networks from this one core technology infrastructure, and it was designed so that support for new networks and devices could be dropped into the system as a software patch," Oliva says. "Our support for Symbian is only another step in this process." t