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Andrew Rafalaf
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Dresdner RCM Goes Live with LandMark

The firm is focusing on the order management and trade blotter functions included in the system.

Dresdner RCM Global Investors, a global money manager with about $77 billion in assets under management, has gone live with TenFold Corp's LandMark trade order management system in its U.K. office.

The firm is focusing currently on the order management and trade blotter functions included in the system, and will not begin transmitting trade data to its brokers electronically until later this year. Dresdner has rolled the system out to three fund managers and plans to have about 50 users on LandMark by year's end.

Nigel Warner, head of operations, says the firm had considered DST International's (DSTi) Open Front Office, Decalog's IDEE and the MacGregor Group's MFTP, but decided on LandMark because of its ease of use relative to its functionality. "I think what we felt was ultimately it had the majority of the functionality that we were looking for, and this was combined with ease of use: how easy fund managers could pull up valuations, model portfolios, average out, rebalance, that kind of thing," Warner recalls. "The presentation of the data, the ability to input data into LandMark through an import or export mechanism we found was relatively painless. It really was the services that go beyond the simple execution component."

Dresdner has successfully interfaced LandMark to its fund accounting system, DSTi's HiPortfolio/2, providing one-time entry of trade data that flows automatically into the back office.

The firm is not currently trading electronically with its brokers, but plans to slowly implement the FIX protocol throughout the year. Until FIX connectivity is implemented, Dresdner's traders will continue to phone in their orders to brokers. "You could argue that we haven't explored the full potential of LandMark in terms of exporting data and using the FIX capability," Warner admits. "We will get there. It's a question of learning to walk before you can run."

There are no plans to roll LandMark out to the firm's other offices in San Francisco and Hong Kong. Warner admits that it would be easier on the system's support staff if the global firm utilized only one trade order management system, but he says that the other two offices are at different stages in their system reviews. Both currently utilize a combination of proprietary products and some functionality inherent in HiPortfolio/2.

Dresdner will only be using LandMark for its equity desks and intends to look for another system to handle fixed-income trading. Warner doesn't believe that LandMark is well suited for the fixed-income world, despite assurances that TenFold is developing more robust fixed-income capabilities to be released this year. Although the firm is not currently searching for a fixed-income trading system, Warner says that if he had to choose now, he would select IDEE.

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