Major IT Players Combine Forces in the "Open MiFID Alliance"
Pan-European Alliance Enables Firms To Comply With New Regulatory Requirements
Paris, France & London, UK - April 12, 2007 - Today, a group of the industry's leading technology providers announced the formation of a new pan-European alliance created to tackle aggressive timescales of the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID). The new alliance enables financial institutions to adopt pragmatic solutions to accelerate the upgrade of their IT infrastructure and meet the regulatory requirements of the directive. Led by Avitis and Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: SUNW) the 'Open MIFID Alliance' partners include Mobius Management Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:MOBI), edge IPK, ULLINK, and Gissing Software.
MiFID will open up the market across Europe, and financial firms need to upgrade existing systems to respond to the new regulatory landscape before the November 1st deadline. Key challenges include: client classification, best execution, transaction reporting, pre- and post-trade transparency, record keeping and systems integration. The Open MiFID Alliance provides a sustainable framework that enables firms to address these challenges immediately with reduced deployment times and risk. These solutions are designed to handle new regulatory requirements and are agile enough to respond to the new, pan-European, competitive marketplace.
The Alliance members bring expertise in the areas of risk and governance, business process management and integration, market data, records management and strategic consultancy to build a solution for MiFID to support any organisation.
The Open MiFID Alliance provides a powerful combination of expertise with regards to the key MiFID challenges:
- Best Execution: ULLINK (and transaction analysis and reporting through their interface to SAS)
- Pre- and Post-trade transparency: Gissing Software
- Record Keeping: Mobius Management Systems
- KYC - Customer Suitability/Appropriateness: edge IPK
- Underlying technology (servers, storage, Java): Sun Microsystems
- System Integration: Avitis
"We are delighted to be jointly leading the Open MiFID Alliance, and believe that this partnership can make a substantial difference to a firm's MiFID deployment time," said Cyril Chiche, Chief Operating Officer of Avitis.
"While we recognise that firms may not take all parts of the Alliance's offering there is benefit from taking more of the offer due to the known interoperability between the solutions with pre-worked integration points which will result in rapid deployment times, lower risk and a better return on investment," said Philip Filleul, MiFID Program Manager at Sun Microsystems.
References for the Open MiFID Alliance members in the financial sector include more than 300 institutions worldwide, including most of the top 50 Global Financial Companies: JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley, HSBC, Credit Suisse, UBS, BNP Paribas, Societe Generale, Credit Agricole, Natixis, BBVA, Grupo Santander, ABN Amro, ING, Barclays, Royal Bank of Scotland, Unicredit, Deutsche Bank, Commerzbank, Fortis Bank, etc.
For further information about the Open MiFID Alliance, and to contact any of the members, please email oma@sun.com.
Open MiFID Alliance members:
About Avitis
Avitis is a value added integrator specialising in Enterprise Content Management (ECM). Avitis ECM offering is designed to help large European customers manage their regulatory and technical requirements. Due to its origins in consulting, Avitis has gathered a vast understanding of the impact of major changes on information systems. Its strong technical and sales partnerships with leading market players allow Avitis to offer in depth technological knowledge combined with true vendor independence. With years of experience in global project management and internal development capabilities, Avitis guarantees its customers a seamless integration of new technologies with their existing information system. Avitis serves over 100 blue chip customers in Europe including major financial institutions such as BNP Paribas, Credit Agricole, Natixis, Caisse d'Epargne and Fortis Bank. www.avitis.net
About edge IPK
edge IPK is an enterprise software company focused on delivering solutions to the financial services Industry. edge IPK has a blue-chip customer base including global implementations across 30 countries for ABN AMRO, Deutsche Bank and group-wide implementations for Zurich Financial Services. edge IPK's flagship product, edgeConnect, is a powerful and flexible open presentation platform, built on an agile service-oriented architecture (SOA), which eliminates the complex, costly and time-consuming effort of developing business solutions. Its unique capability allows business users and IT to work together to create, visualize, deploy and maintain complex front-end applications. www.edgeipk.com
About Gissing Software
Gissing Software is the market leading provider of multi-contribution systems for management and distribution of market data, and counts some of the world's biggest financial institutions among its clients. Almost all of Gissing's clients are tier one banks and brokers. With over 55 installations globally, Gissing's products are a byword in the industry for performance and reliability. Gissing Software has extensive knowledge of the technology associated with the transforming and routing of real-time data in the financial markets. Its product area focus includes MiFID solutions for pre-trade and post-trade transparency. www.gissing.com
About Mobius
Mobius Management Systems, Inc. is the leading provider of integrated solutions for enterprise archiving and records management. The company's comprehensive software suite integrates content across disparate repositories, supports regulatory compliance, and provides content-enabled applications that automate business processes. Mobius solutions have achieved industry-wide recognition for breadth of functionality, breadth of supported formats, and high-volume, high-demand performance. The Mobius customer base is made up of leading companies across all industries, including more than sixty percent of the Fortune 100. The company, founded in 1981, is headquartered in Rye, New York, with sales offices in the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Australia and Japan, as well as a network of agents in Central and South America, Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia. www.mobius.com
About Sun Microsystems, Inc. & SAS
The SAS and Sun Solaris partnership meets the growing demand for high-quality software programs combined with advanced operating systems. With SAS business intelligence software running on the Solaris 10 OS, customers now have access to the most popular features that are unique to the Sun Solaris operating system, such as Dynamic Tracing (DTrace), Predictive Self-Healing and Solaris Containers. These sophisticated features provide customers with increased network security, enhanced system observability and less overall server downtime. SAS has MiFID expertise in post-trade analysis and competent authority reporting. A singular vision -- "The Network Is The Computer" -- guides Sun in the development of technologies that power the world's most important markets. Sun's philosophy of sharing innovation and building communities is at the forefront of the next wave of computing: the Participation Age. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the Web at www.sun.com.
About ULLINK
ULLINK is a leading provider of connectivity and trading solutions for financial institutions. With over 260 ready-to-trade connections to favourite destinations (brokers, exchanges, order routing networks and trading applications, in all formats and all asset classes), we help our customers build environments that relieve them from technical dependence on a specific vendor: connect your existing applications to our platform (the UL BRIDGE), select your destinations and start trading. In addition to this unique connectivity solution, benefit from turn-key DMA and care order architectures, full order management with dedicated sales and dealer interfaces, exception management, best execution and algorithmic trading across the globe. These flexible solutions are also available in Facilities Management (we host and support the entire solution in your name) or through our global FIX hub, the UL NET. With offices in New-York, London, Paris and Hong Kong, we support clients across time zones. Hundreds of connections for many of the world's largest financial institutions have built our reputation for delivering high-quality software and exceptional services. www.ullink.com and www.ullink.net
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