PRODUCT WATCH

The latest and greatest offerings from Wall Street's vendors.

STP Tag Team
IBM and SunGard have teamed up to provide straight-through-processing solutions to the financial-services industry.

Under the agreement, the companies will provide each other with technology to leverage IBM's STP Workbench and capitalize on the estimated $19 billion that research firm TowerGroup predicts financial-service firms will spend on STP and T+1 solutions in the coming years.

Elaine Sullivan, general manager of IBM global financial markets, says that by joining forces and combining SunGard solutions with IBM hardware and middleware, "It will allow customers to meet T+1 requirements."

Under the agreement, SunGard will port a number of its financial-services applications to IBM eServer hardware and will expand its use of IBM's database software and its WebSphere-software platform.

In turn, IBM will deploy a number of products from SunGard, including Global Plus, a real-time, multi-currency asset-management and accounting platform, WorldLend, a securities-lending solution and Omni IC, a real-time, multi-platform system for domestic or global custody accounting. These will be added to the financial-services-solutions suite from IBM.

IBM will also use SunGard BrokerWare, a messaging/middleware platform that allows financial institutions to offer customers and brokers online-trading and portfolio-management services.

IBM will expand its financial-integration sales force and include specialists who offer both IBM and SunGard solutions. www.ibm.com/partnerworld/developer

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Targeting Technical Trading
Technical-trading software Recognia Inc. is launching new software that detects equity-trading opportunities using technical indicators.

Sean Church, chief executive officer of the Ottawa-based company, says, "Technical-event indicators are one of the remaining areas of investment-data analysis not readily available to the mass market. Our software makes technical indicators understandable and actionable to the average investor."

Recognia automatically scans all of the securities trading on the principal exchanges in North America to identify technical events, such as patterns in the price and volume movements of stocks.

The software identifies, characterizes and logs the events in an XML data warehouse, which clients can access through the Internet. It scans more than 20,000 charts each day. As patterns are discovered and annotated, the results are permanently stored in Recognia's database, which allows historical comparisons of patterns for evaluation of past performance.

It has both a retail- and institutional-investor appeal, Church says. Financial institutions pay a fee for the information and can use it to increase activity and loyalty on their own Web site. Through private labeling, portfolio managers and traders can use it to improve their performance.

Recognia's product offering targets the online investor, through their dealer, allowing them to: identify changes to fundamental criteria; alert investors to the formation of technical patterns and screen and search for trading ideas.

www.recognia.com; 416-697-8400

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CheckFree Launches New Browser
CheckFree Investment Services is launching a series of Web tools designed to take its APL platform out of the back office of investment firms and into the front office for investment professionals.

The APL Browser 1.0, the first of the tools, will allow discretionary money managers to better administer their client's accounts by eliminating the need to handle them individually.

For example, brokers will be able to label accounts based on a predefined investment model, such as an aggressive income-oriented account. The broker can then sell or buy a security within that defined field and it will apply across all the accounts within that category, eliminating the need to repeat the transaction for each client.

Hilary Fiorella, vice president at CheckFree, says, "The swelling population of brokers, who are functioning as money managers, need simple but powerful tools they can use to actively guide their clients' investments." The tool allows them to focus their attention on selling, she says.

The APL browser will also generate reports, such as realized gains or losses, holdings across multiple accounts, holdings by tax lots, positions or sectors, performance and security and cash transactions.

A number of clients are currently testing the browser, which supports CheckFree APL and APL Wrap, including RBC Dain Rauscher and First Union Securities, says Fiorella.

www.checkfree.com/investmentservices; 201-332-2020

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Corporate-Event Tracking
Thomson Financial has beefed up its corporate-event tracking tools with the launch of First Call Events and First Call Webcast, designed to foster communication between companies and institutional money managers.

"Our institutional clients save time by accessing company information from the same Thomson Financial applications they use each day to access sell-side investment research," says Nick Pastoressa, senior vice president of Thomson Financial's investment-management group.

First Call Events is a calendar of events, such as corporate-earnings announcements, conference calls and analyst meetings. It covers information from more than 5,000 U.S. public companies and hundreds of sell-side brokers.

First Call Web Events provides real-time access to more than 3,500 streaming Webcasts every quarter, including earnings announcements and executive roundtables.