Windows NT Chosen by Increasing Number of Top Trading Rooms and Leading Retail Brokerage Firms; Windows NT Takes Hold in Middle Office
REDMOND, Wash. June 4, 1996 A multitude of top trading rooms and the nation’s leading brokerage firms are standardizing on the Microsoft® Windows NT®
operating system.
Windows NT and the Microsoft BackOffice
™
family, combined with solutions from the industry’s leading software vendors, give brokerage, trading and asset management firms a single integrated environment that is ideally suited to handle the entire securities transaction life cycle.
“Windows NT is a reliable and cost-effective network operating system for managing and integrating the myriad applications found in a trading room environment,”
said Ray duTremblay, executive vice president of Interport Financial, a trading room consulting firm in New York.
“Windows NT enables the trading room to choose ‘best of breed’ applications that meet their unique needs.”
Matthew Conners, securities industry marketing manager at Microsoft, said Windows NT is being widely deployed across an industry that has traditionally been UNIX®
-based.
“The bottom line is that Windows NT helps firms better serve their clients,”
Conners said.
“It’s robust, secure and provides an easy-to-use environment that helps front-office professionals gain clients and make money, and it helps operations professionals handle the delivery of market data and transactional information.”
Trading Firms Choose Windows NT for Performance
Windows NT has become the platform of choice for leading trading, retail brokerage and asset management firms. Montgomery Securities, for example, standardized on the Windows NT platform for its primary business needs.
“Our trading room is a very time-sensitive, core area of our company that calls for dependable and powerful computing support,”
said Larry Sikon, vice president and director of technical services at Montgomery Securities.
“Windows NT Workstation 4.0 has allowed us to develop an industrial-strength solution for our trading room that is quick for our traders to learn, is easy to use, and reduces transaction response time. In a sense, we are betting the business on Windows NT, and we could not have done that before.”
Trading firms who are using Microsoft Windows NT include CIBC Wood Gundy, ING Barings Bank, J.C. Bradford & Co., Lehman Brothers, Montgomery Securities, Natwest Markets Group Inc., Norwest Investment Services Inc., Tullet and Tokyo Forex Inc., and The World Bank.
Brokerage Firms Continue to Invest in Windows NT
Smith Barney Inc.’s financial consultants will be able to better serve their clients and manage prospects with the recently selected Windows NT and Microsoft BackOffice platform for Smith Barney’s enterprisewide retail brokerage computing solution.
The ability to improve performance at the front office while centrally managing more than 86 branch offices in 15 states led J.C. Bradford & Co. of Nashville, Tenn., to select Windows NT and Microsoft BackOffice for its retail brokerage operation.
Many of the nation’s leading retail brokerage firms have standardized on Microsoft Windows NT, including Merrill Lynch, Smith Barney, Charles Schwab, Legg Mason, J.C. Bradford & Co., Interstate/Johnson Lane, McDonald & Company, Wheat First Butcher Singer, and William Blair & Company.
Windows NT Advances Into Middle Office
Because of its ability to process large-scale complex calculations and transactions on high-performance servers, Windows NT is moving deeper into the core of the securities industry with an increasing number of middle-office solutions.
A growing list of vendors provide derivatives-trading and risk-management solutions. They include SunGard Capital Markets, Infinity Financial Technology and Investment Support Systems Inc.
CPR, a leading French banking group specializing in the trading, arbitrage and management of financial assets, has implemented Infinity’s Fin++ Financial Class Library on Windows NT for its risk management.
“Microsoft Windows NT Workstation and Infinity’s Fin++ Class Library unite to form a robust, flexible platform that will work exceptionally well with our bank’s proprietary risk methodology,”
said Franck Meyer, information technology product manager at CPR.
“We believe this combination represents the best possible solution for integrating our middle-office and front-office systems for real-time risk analysis.”
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (NASDAQ
“MSFT”
) is the worldwide leader in software for personal computers. The company offers a wide range of products and services for business and personal use, each designed with the mission of making it easier and more enjoyable for people to take advantage of the full power of personal computing every day.
Microsoft, Windows NT and BackOffice are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corp. in the United States and/or other countries.
UNIX is a registered trademark in the United States and/or other countries, licensed exclusively through X/Open Company Ltd.
