SIFMA 2010 Sell-Side Wrap Up 2

Following last week’s coverage of the 2010 SIFMA Financial Services Technology Expo in New York, we’ve condensed and organized the news we’ve gathered in order to provide more targeted wrap-up highlights and analysis pertinent to buy- and sell-side readers.

Market data and analytics vendor Interactive Data has made several enhancements to its evaluated pricing business.

The firm has added coverage for more than 10,000 fixed-income products, as well as more than 6,000 new structured products and nearly 4,000 corporate securities.

Interactive Data has also partnered with Russell Investments to launch its Fair Value Information Service, which includes fair value adjusted index data to boost performance measurement capabilities among international equity mutual fund managers.

In addition, the vendor's pricing service now provides daily evaluations for fixed-rate reverse mortgage-backed securities issued under the Government National Mortgage Association's home equity conversion mortgage program, meant to free up liquidity for reverse mortgage lenders.

FIX infrastructure developer CameronTec has signed Société Générale's corporate and investment banking division to its CameronFIX Engine for fixed-income and currency FIX support.

The contract between CameronTec and Société Générale, based on the vendor's licensing subscription model, was finalized during the first quarter of 2010.

According to officials at the bank and the vendor, CameronFIX will be used as a foundation for the bank's global foreign exchange (FX) distribution architecture as well as for its recently launched FIX eCommerce API platform.

Orange Business Services' Trading Solutions unit has launched a mobile voice recording capability for traders' BlackBerry phones to enable remote and transparent activity.

Trading calls made on BlackBerry smart phones are logged by the application on Orange's voice trading platform, and calls are automatically recorded in accordance with regulatory requirements.

SunGard has combined the latest version of its Front Arena trading and risk platform with Sybase's Adaptive Server Enterprise 15 (ASE 15) enterprise data management (EDM) system to speed up transaction processing for clients.

Sybase and SunGard claim that the combined product set has led to a 400 percent increase in exchange data transaction processing rates among Front Arena clients. The addition of ASE 15 to the SunGard platform will yield benefits in terms of better performance, operational risk reduction and increased operational efficiencies, according to the vendors.

Bottom line: By focusing on improving efficiencies, which each of these vendors has fundamentally done, they make a stronger case to their existing and potential sell-side clients in lean economic times.