Vol 4 No 12
BRIEF OBJECTS
BRIEF OBJECTS
MONEYLINE RECEIVES $36M IN FUNDING ROUND
Moneyline has obtained $36 million of investment funding from Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Global Crossing, Garban-Intercapital, Comdisco and Accel Partners. The application service provider says the funding will go into developing its transaction and data delivery products for which the company says it has seen growing demand.
RIGGS BANK SELECTS MKI FOR ENGLISH TRADE ACTIVITIES
US-based Riggs Bank has selected Midas Kapiti International's Midas Private Banking solution to support its recently established London and Channel Islands trading operations. The product will be used by the bank for its relationship and portfolio management, order routing, transaction processing and settlement activities. Riggs also selected MKI's Meridien middleware solution to link the bank's customer relationship management system with its back-office. MKI is also to supply the bank with an outsourced facilities management service to run the bank's collection of IBM operation and Microsoft application servers that will be housed at Riggs' London office.
NEON ESTIMATES DISAPPOINTING Q4 AND FULL-YEAR RESULTS
Neon says it expects to show dismal fourth quarter earnings figures of $40 million following a large number of customers and prospective clients' decision to postpone or defer their purchasing decisions. Neon chairman and CEO Rick Adam says the estimates are "disappointing and below expectations," considering that the fourth quarter is traditionally when a large number of contracts are closed. Neon also expects its year 2000 results to be low at $188 million. Neon's fourth quarter and full-year results will be released on Jan. 23.
ALLIANCE & LEICESTER TAKE AFA'S DART FOR DERIVATIVES TRADING
Trading firm Alliance & Leicester Group Treasury has gone live with AFA's Dart ++ real-time pricing and systems management product for its derivatives trading activities. The firm says it selected the product, which includes energy and equity calculators, pricing tools and historic pricing base features, largely because of AFA's commitment to further develop exotics trading products on the system.
ESPEED EXCEEDS PRODUCT LAUNCH TARGETS FOR THE YEAR
Espeed says it has exceeded its product rollout targets for the year 2000, currently offering 43 on the company's Espeed trading platform, surpassing the 40 it had planned to offer by the end of the year. The company says it plans to continue rolling out new products, expand into new vertical markets and introduce more trade market platforms following the Tradespark natural energy platform Espeed launched in conjunction with five US energy companies in September.
ABN AMRO LAUNCHES DIRECTORY OF ONLINE EXCHANGES
ABN Amro has launched a directory service listing the more than 2,000 online trading market platforms currently available. Called the ABN Amro B2B Eexchange Search Directory, the service can be downloaded for free from the bank's home page, and users can search for sites by a number of criteria, including membership requirements, regions served, special features, transaction model type, associated costs and market type. ABN says the service, developed by the bank's San Francisco-based Sage Corp. stock options and futures clearing arm, has an automated monitoring process that identifies new sites regularly.
ABN AMRO TO BUILD TECH CENTER IN CHICAGO
In other news, ABN Amro and its subsidiary, LaSalle Bank, will be breaking ground in the third quarter for a new technology center in Chicago. The twin office tower project will help the banks reduce operations costs, as the bank will consolidate its five current downtown operations locations, although there is no plan to relocate the company's headquarters. A trading facility will also be built at the new site and will accommodate an unspecified amount of traders, who will be relocated from two different sites. Occupancy is expected sometime in 2003.
FOUR US CLEARING BODIES PLAN TO CONSOLIDATE
The four main US clearing bodies have tentatively agreed to consolidate their trade clearance activities. The move follows a three-month assessment conducted by the boards of the Depository Trust & Clearing Corp., the Emerging Markets Clearing Corp., the Government Securities Clearing Corp. and the MBS Clearing Corp. The four organizations say trends in the market and technology suggest the industry can achieve greater efficiencies through consolidation, particularly in fixed-income processing.
GLOBALTOPIC USERS TO BE GIVEN REMOTE ACCESS CAPABILITY
Thomson Financial Solutions, Thomson's online and wireless systems provider, is opening up wireless trading and market data access to its Globaltopic clients through WAP and other forthcoming protocols such as GPRS, UMTS and G3. Clients of Globaltopic will be able to connect remotely with real-time access to Thomson's market data content provision companies.
NEW YORK DWT AND DWR EVENTS TO BE HELD FEB. 7
This year's Dealing With Technology 2001 and Dealing With Risk 2001 events in New York will be held on Feb. 7 at the Bridgewaters venue on Fulton Street. This is the second year the events, organized by the DWT Conferences company, jointly owned by Risk Waters Group and Write Image, will be held in that city. Dealing With Technology, which focuses on global financial markets emerging technologies, and Dealing With Risk, which focuses on global risk technology advances, will see vendor presentations and the main players in both arenas displaying their products and services. The London event, the seventh annual conference for that city, will be held at the Brewery on Chiswell Street on April 4.
