01/11/2004

A presentation given at the Arcontech user group meeting last Thursday sparked some interesting discussion. A high profile user put forward a well argued case showing the three-way benefits of the Arcontech hosted service: lower running costs and more reliable services for the contributor; lower collection, comms and maintenance costs for the Vendor; and increased revenue for the service provider. Major benefits for business continuity planning, relocation and improved time-to-market were also identified.

Representatives from Reuters, Telerate and Comstock joined the debate, as well as several contributors. A number of counter arguments were put forward, not least worries that the client/vendor relationship could be diminished. However, there was ultimate agreement that the idea was sound and that with suitable assurances over service reliability, latency, availability and security there could be all-round benefit. The key challenges were seen as gaining critical mass and changing Vendor attitudes.

Andrew Miller, Managing Director of Arcontech said: “I see this as a clear win-win-win scenario. Neither Vendor nor client has anything to lose from this approach except direct cost and overheads. We are a technology company and will not interfere with any client/Vendor relationship – we merely facilitate a better technical implementation.”

The community concept is built entirely on Arcontech’s CityVision StarNet real-time products and hosted in resilient centres with guaranteed up time. StarNet technology allows controlled interaction between multiple domains and is highly scaleable. Its built in interfaces and multiple platform APIs mean that contributions from most sites can be implemented in short timescales with minimal effort.

24/08/2004

In its latest six-monthly survey of the regulatory news market, Knowledge Technology Solutions PLC (KTS) exposes the continued reduction in popularity of the London Stock Exchange’s Regulatory News Service (RNS). Between February and August 2004, 71.05% of the 89,189 regulatory news announcements issued were distributed by RNS compared to 73.78% in the previous six months. KTS’s regular survey shows that RNS’s share has steadily fallen since the market was opened up to other primary information providers (PIPs) in April 2002.

In June, Waymaker merged with Romeike Media Intelligence (another subsidiary of its parent company Sweden-based Observer AB group) which did not have a regulatory news service. The combined business, which has retained the Romeike name, was the biggest beneficiary of RNS’s decreased market share over the last six months. Its portion of the regulatory news market has leapt from 5.59% to 8.31% during the period which builds on its 0.86% increase in the previous six months following a reduction of its charges for news and results announcements.

PR Newswire has the second biggest share of the market but there is still a significant gap to the market leader, the London Stock Exchange’s RNS service. In the last six months it has handled 11.84% of regulatory news announcements, a fairly modest increase on its 11.12% share in the six months before. The only other PIP to grow its slice of the regulatory news market was Hugin which controls a lowly 0.69%, up from 0.56% in February.

Other than RNS, BusinessWire was the only PIP to see its share of the market fall between February and August. It dropped from 8.56% to 7.72%. PIMS, the smallest PIP by volume of announcements distributed maintained its 0.39% segment of the market.

The source of KTS’s data is its UK live financial news and data service, QuoteTerminal, which carries comprehensive regulatory news from all PIPs.

Dr Marc Pinter-Krainer, Chief Executive of KTS, said:

“Unsurprisingly RNS’s large market share has continued to fall but it is still the out and out market leader by volume of announcements distributed. Perhaps more interestingly, Romeike has overtaken BusinessWire to become the third largest PIP and, if it continues to expand at the same rate, it may well threaten PRNewswire’s place as number two in the market.”

02/06/2004

Arcontech’s CityVision StarNet has beaten the competition to win the award for ‘Best Technology to the Sell-Side’ at this year’s second annual The Banker Technology Awards.

Arcontech’s winning product, StarNet, is a global market data platform that provides reliable, real-time data publishing and gathering worldwide. It extends CityVision’s proven real-time middleware to wide area and global IP internetworks, enhancing globalised management, security and bandwidth efficiency and adding features for web server and browser integration.

StarNet covers all the key bases of technology allowing ultimate user choice. Use of the product over the public Internet allows firms to complete projects – such as the setting up of a remote office – in a matter of days, without expensive development and consulting.

“We are very pleased to win such a prestigious award,” said Andrew Miller, managing director of Arcontech. “This endorsement of StarNet is a tribute to Arcontech’s vision, and a tremendous accolade to our development team, acknowledging their contribution as skilled, responsive and innovative, delivering cutting edge solutions to the financial community.”

This is the second The Banker Technology Awards. The awards recognize best of breed, innovation and success in financial technology. The Banker’s goal has been to highlight those vendors, large and small, who have made a real contribution to advancing shareholder value and customer service within financial institutions over the past 12 months. The Banker is part of the Financial Times Business Group.

Judges for The Banker Technology Awards represent a cross section of financial technology expertise. They include: Chris Skinner, independent consultant, Balatro Ltd., research director, Shaping Tomorrow; John Stone, MD TowerGroup Advisory Services EMEA; Russell Simm director of technology and process design, Alliance & Leicester; John Brosky. MD EFMA (European Financial Management and Marketing Association); Bob Fuller, information technology director, Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein; and P.J. DiGiammarino, director of information technology, Barclays Capital.

17/05/2004

Tullett Financial, a leading provider of real-time money markets, interest rate derivatives and fixed income price information from the inter-dealer market, today announced that it has launched a service which offers customers direct Internet access to Tullett Financial’s premium data products; SwapMarker, MortgageMarker and TreasuryMarker.

The data can be viewed in two ways. The first is a light application, downloaded by the client, which enables the delivery of Tullett Financial’s information products via the Internet direct to user workstations. Once installed, the application consists of the Tullett PageViewer enabling a user to view data within Tullett Financial-designed intuitive page displays. Blocks of data and their underlying records can then be highlighted, dragged, and dropped into Microsoft Excel spreadsheets for manipulation and in-depth analysis. The underlying records within the spreadsheet continuously update in real-time. The application also has an Excel add-in for enhanced functionality which allows the user to set up chains, tables and pages directly from within Excel. All data viewed in Excel is “pushed” in a real-time event driven manner and displayed in an efficient “array” form to minimise workstation CPU load.

For organisations that simply want to view the pages from SwapMarker, MortgageMarker or TreasuryMarker without accessing the underlying records, a second method of access is available via http://www.tullettfinancial.comthrough a user’s web browser. This method provides the ability to launch floating windows for more efficient use of the desktop.

The technology underlying both services is the CityVision StarNet product from real-time market data applications specialist, Arcontech.

Commenting on the launch of the new Internet delivered services, David Mukerji, Director and Global Head of Sales for Tullett Financial said, “We are already seeing significant interest in this new delivery channel from our customers. It has proved of particular interest to users within large customer sites and smaller firms who do not have access to or require the breadth of content provided by traditional vendor terminals, but who do require a broad spectrum of fixed income, interest rate derivatives and money markets information at a cost effective price point. Furthermore, the ability to consume our information within spreadsheets over the Internet, in addition to viewing the page displays, provides these customers with a level of functionality and utility hitherto only available via vendor terminals.”

16/03/2004

London: Arcontech, the London-based real-time market data applications and middleware specialist is celebrating 25 years of continued business success.

Arcontech started developing custom solutions for financial institutions in 1979 and has since become one of the leading experts in real-time processing and messaging. Clients range from major investment banks and National Treasury through to on-line trading firms.

“It is particularly satisfying to have reached this milestone, maturing through the difficult market conditions of the past two years, ready for strong growth as the industry recovers,” said Andrew Miller, chief executive of Arcontech.

In recent years, Arcontech technology has been behind the rapid expansion in the internet-based spread betting markets. Implementation of an Arcontech service allowed leading financial spread-betting specialist City Index to quadruple its business in one year. City Index was subsequently voted best spread betting firm and CFD provider in 2002 and 2003 by Investors Chronicle magazine.

Through constant investment in leading edge technology, Arcontech has stayed at the forefront of developments in the field. “Financial sector users are among the most demanding and are constantly seeking to gain and retain a competitive edge through IT,” said Miller. “It’s been a busy twelve months, with significant change in the market. We’ve seen solid evidence, in terms of sales, that our product development and strategic alliances reflect growing customer demand for our technology.”

In January this year Tullett Financial Information selected Arcontech to provide a global distribution system – which will initially be implemented in London and New York – to bolster their direct offerings of market data to customers.

In August 2003, Arcontech signed a deal to work with Radianz to deliver their products and services over the Radianz network, offering a combined market data package that will allow institutions to share their data directly, avoiding the costs and inefficiencies of traditional vendors such as Bloomberg and MoneyLine Telerate.

In November 2003 Arcontech launched Excelerator 2, which allows users to exchange real-time data between Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and to include multiple sources, including vendor feeds. It works over StarNet, so can be a strategic component connecting producers and consumers of real-time market data globally.

In December 2003 a strategic marketing and technology alliance was announced with Cicada, a global provider of data validation and cleansing services.

“There have been incredible changes in the industry over the last 25 years” says Miller “and the pace of change continues to increase. Our clients have come to rely on Arcontech to continue to develop and support the most competitive solutions in a demanding market.”

24/02/2004

The latest bi-annual PIPs survey by Knowledge Technology Solutions PLC (KTS) reveals that in the last six months, the leading provider of regulatory news distribution – the London Stock Exchange’s Regulatory News Service (RNS) – has continued to lose market share to competitor Primary Information Providers (PIPs). The percentage of regulatory news announcements distributed by RNS fell by almost 5% (4.65%) to 73.78% over the period. This is the first time that RNS’s market share has fallen below 75%.

Since the market was opened up to competition in April 2002, KTS’s surveys have shown that the rival PIPs have slowly but steadily eaten into RNS’s market share. Of the 87,674 regulatory news announcements made in the last six months, a greater proportion than ever, (22,987), were distributed by the five competing services.

The data was sourced from KTS’s UK live financial news and data service, QuoteTerminal, which aggregates all the PIPs announcements sent to the London Stock Exchange.

BusinessWire, the third largest PIP by volume of announcements distributed, experienced the greatest increase in market share, +2.24% to 8.56%, with PR Newswire, the second biggest PIP, adding 1.90% to its share to reach 11.12%. PIMS, despite only holding marginal market share, also grew by 0.03% to 0.39%. Hugin was the only PIP to experience a small decrease. Its market share fell from 0.58% to 0.56%. NewslinkÕs service remains suspended as of June 2003.

The main development since the last survey has been the overhaul of Waymaker’s price plan. Waymaker, which has 5.59% of the PIPs market, now claims to be market leader on price. It has reduced its charges for news and results announcements from £50 to £10 and has also capped its annual charge at £1,000, the lowest of all the services. Consequently, it gained 0.86% of the market over the last six months.

Dr Marc Pinter-Krainer, Chief Executive of KTS, said:

“The enduring dominance of RNS demonstrates that its established reputation and high quality service obviously still count. However, it’s not surprising that RNS’s market share is continuing to fall. With Waymaker reducing its charges by £40 per announcement, it will be interesting to see if any of the other services follow suit and introduce price incentives in an attempt to grab more of the market from RNS”

26/01/2004

Tullett Financial Information, a major provider of money markets, interest rate derivatives and fixed income data from the inter-dealer market, has selected Arcontech, the London-based real-time market data applications and middleware specialist to provide a global distribution system to bolster their direct offerings of market data to customers.

Initially, StarNet will be implemented in London and New York. This will provide increased regional capacity and resilience. Very aggressive timescales have been set for the project – the system is expected to go live early in 2004 against a contract agreed late in November 2003.

Tullett Financial’s customers will be able to choose from and combine several delivery mechanisms:

A web-based implementation will use Arcontech’s “CityVision JClients” Java displays to provide simple access to Tullett Financial’s optional services such as SwapMarker and MortgageMarker.

The web sites will also distribute a package including Arcontech’s CityVision Excelerator, enabling Excel users to access Tullett Financial’s information services directly within spreadsheets, via leased line, RadianzNet or the Public Internet.

The solution includes an innovative page-viewing applet, which allows Tullett Financial’s customers to highlight blocks of data from pages and drag and drop them into Excel. A special add-in developed by Arcontech for Tullett Financial then populates Excel with the underlying record and field definitions and updates them in real-time.

CityVision components will also allow Tullett Financial’s institutional clients and web vendor redistributors to integrate both pages and logical records easily within a multitude of possible web product offerings or corporate intranet solutions.

A specially developed StarNet handler for Tullett Financial’s SURF data feed receives information in page and logical record form and distributes to end-users via Arcontech’s CityVision StarNet middleware.

David Mukerji, director & global head of sales for Tullett Financial says, “It was clear that Arcontech had the underlying components we needed to build the distribution system we specified and a skilled and responsive development team to address our requirements. We’re looking forward to a significant take-up of our products distributed via this technology when the services are launched early this year.”

Andrew Miller, CEO of Arcontech says, “We are very excited about this deployment – it’s StarNet end-to-end and a huge endorsement of our technology as a global real-time messaging platform by yet another major player.”

Under the terms of the deal, Arcontech will also provide assistance, where required, for institutional and vendor clients of Tullett Financial who wish to incorporate the company’s data into their own web pages or intranets. However, according to Miller, the use of CityVision components removes much of the hard work and simplifies greatly the integration task for web support staff.

Miller again: “We have designed our components with the capacity for rapid development in mind and we anticipate significant interest from others in the ground-breaking approach we have taken.”