CityCompass, the discussion and education forum for the financial services industry, announced that it has formed a partnership for financial technology analysis with Bloor Research, Europe’s largest independent IT analysts, in order to address important technology and business issues within the industry.
The new partnership, which will operate throughout 2004 through a series of joint events and reports, will undertake as a first project the benchmarking of Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and Web services systems for achieving real-time STP. Bloor Research will subsequently produce a definitive analysis of financial services (FS) business requirements and will benchmark available EAI and web services systems accordingly. The report, which will be previewed at CityCompass’s benchmarking event on December 2, is expected to be available in the New Year, at which point it will be sold to vendors and users.
The Bloor Research Real-time STP Benchmarking Report will establish FS STP business and technology requirements and business usage of integration products among large and small volume users in the securities, retail banking and insurance sectors. Among the criteria to be examined will be internet and FIX order capture, real time access to reference data, routing, internal and external integration/ communication with disparate systems and online presentation of transactions for management and regulatory reporting.
The panel, led by Steve Craggs of the EAI Industry Consortium, includes Bob Fuller of Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, Richard Cargill of Morley Fund Managers, Clive Verrall of BNP Paribas, Richard Wilson of HSBC and Alan Jenkins of OpRisk Ltd.
Gary Wright, Director of CityCompass, comments: “Bloor Research’s reputation and expertise will add depth to the services we are providing and give us additional resources for the breakfast briefings, workshops and other events which we organize. Bloor has a particularly strong relationship with the IT vendors while we are close to City technology users. The market should gain an even more informed view from the combination. That will produce a new concept in benchmarking and the first analysis of the best EAI and Web services for Real Time STP.”
“To date, for whatever reason, organizations have fought shy of making technology application comparisons with user business requirements within specific market sectors; this has been a barrier to achieve STP in financial services,” adds Bob McDowall, Director of Bloor Research. “CityCompass can put their fingers on the hot topics within FS and we bring a broader range of skills and knowledge to the table.
We are also hopeful that our overseas reach will be tapped to the benefit of both companies.”