03:54 AM
W-Trade Releases New 401k Application for Hand-held Devices
W-Trade Technologies, known for enabling brokers and their clients with wireless trading, has extended its wireless application suite to include w-401k, a portfolio management and trading application suited for investors and fund managers. The product, released with a host of others last week, can also be set up to deliver alerts on position changes dependent on predefined rules.
Donna Oliva, ceo of w-Trade, explains that w-401k couples its generic trading applicationwhich can trade any financial instrument, from stocks to options to fundwith portfolio management tools. In the case of fund managers, w-401k is capable of handling multiple accounts.
The system, like all of w-Trades applications, connects directly to a firms back-end systems, rather than to the front-end Web servers. This method, as opposed to screen scraping allows the 401k manager to customize the product in any number of ways, and also provides a much more scaleable product. As such, w-401k will work on any number of digital phones, pagers, PDAs, Palm-size computers and hybrid devices like the Nokia 9000. Oliva explains that products that screen-scrape are typically limited to browser-based devices.
The portfolio management functions of w-401k include account look-up, transferring of funds between accounts and performance charts and graphs. Oliva says that w-Trade takes the approach of offering a standard core of functions that can be customized, as opposed to some of its competitors which build a system from the ground up for each client.
We take the approach of having raw functionality encapsulated in the module so the time to market is much faster, she explains. She adds that a few firms are piloting w-401k, but she declines to name them.