10:10 AM
INVESTMENT MANAGEMENT TECHNOLOGY BRIEFS
QED Information Systems, Inc., a provider of portfolio-management and investment-accounting solutions, announced that the West Virginia,Office of the State Treasurer has selected QTMS for the purpose of Warrant (check) reconciliation. QTMS is a real-time fund-accounting and payment-item-reconciliation system engineered for public-treasury organizations to handle high-volume, automated processing. QTMS allows The Treasury to interface with issuing banks and statewide accounting systems to automatically update the warrant data, providing instant access to the latest payment and receipts. West Virginia, Office of the State Treasurer is also going to use the collateral-tracking capabilities of IMS-2000 to monitor the collateral sufficiency for overnight repurchase agreements, state deposits, and external-entity depots as well as other collateral-tracking requirements.
Thomson Financial announced Empire Financial Group's completion of its PORTIA implementation, capping an installation that took place last July in the Toronto investment office of the Canadian life insurer, The Empire Life Insurance Company. At present, 36 users across the front- to back-office are utilizing PORTIA to streamline the workflow associated with managing assets of Empire Financial's subsidiaries and related companies totaling $5 billion Canadian. Empire Financial went live with PORTIA last November, upon completing phase one of its implementation.
Liquidnet, an alternative-trading system (ATS) exclusively for institutional investors, said that it traded its 500 millionth share yesterday. The ATS also said that based on figures from the Plexus Group second quarter 2001 analysis, Liquidnet saved its Members approximately $26 million in trading costs for NYSE and Amex listed stocks and approximately $28 million in trading costs for Nasdaq listed stocks, compared with other means of executing trades. Liquidnet's average trade size is more than 71,000 shares compared to an average of 800 shares for all other exchanges and execution venues. Liquidnet claims that more than 90 percent of its members' trades have been completed within the bid/ask spread, indicating their trades are being completed without moving the market.