In 1995 Andrew Rudd, co-founder and chairman of risk management systems company Barra, opened a side business, Advisor Software (ASI). Rudd aimed to adapt Barra’s brand of institutional-strength analytics for individual investors.
ASI saw little action, however, until the past year. Suddenly, the 25-employee company had a growing customer list that included Barclays Global Investors, Fidelity Investments and First Federal Bank of California.
Why the slow buildup? Rudd at first had tried to sell a comprehensive wealth management platform for financial advisers, which, he admits, “didn’t create enough efficiencies to be worth the agony of installing it.” Then came the tech crash. “For three or four years, nobody wanted to place bets on anything,” recalls Rudd, 53, who was Barra’s CEO from 1984 to 1999 and serves as chairman and CEO of privately held ASI in Lafayette, California.
When budgets began to loosen up, buyers homed in on ASI’s Investment Proposal Solution, which streamlines customer profiling and risk assessment, pinpoints investment recommendations and produces an investment plan.
“What pays off for our users are increases in clients and assets under management,” says Rudd. “BGI, for example, is using our system with their exchange-traded funds -- novel products that need to be explained to clients in a friendly, informative way.”
BGI launched its asset-allocation proposal tool in November, says J. Parsons, who oversees the Barclays unit’s intermediary sales. “If somebody approaches an adviser and says, ‘I have $1 million, how do I invest it?’, that’s a very complex question,” Parsons says. Advisers and brokers can go to BGI’s IShares.com Web site for answers. “The tool comes up quickly with an investment strategy, but it’s not a simple process,” Parsons explains. -- Jeffrey Kutler
Tackling the “tactical grid”
Financial institutions face a systems integration crisis. For all the processing capacity they have amassed, technology managers can hardly keep up with demands to make companies’ diverse computer arrays and software libraries work together as one big, efficient machine.
At the same time, the financial industry is eager to embrace grid computing: the concept of linking many machines to run computation-intensive tasks such as econometric models or risk scenarios.
But if they can’t get systems integration right, they’ll never tap the full potential of the grid. Indra Mohan, who helped pioneer integration two decades ago at Reuters Group affiliate Tibco Software, wants to bridge the gap. In January Mohan became CEO of Enigmatec Corp., a three-year-old London company selling grid management technology to Wall Street.
“Enigmatec has world-class technology that reminds me of Tibco’s middleware,” says Mohan, referring to the software that many companies depend on for messaging and transaction processing. Mohan, 48, who had been an Enigmatec director before taking founder Duncan Johnston-Watt’s place as CEO, asserts that a large firm running as many as 1,500 applications “needs a distributed, policy-based management system,” such as Enigmatec’s Reactive Intelligence Framework, which automatically harnesses available power into a “tactical grid.”
Johnston-Watt, who remains chief technology officer, reports that Enigmatec has made its first sale, to an undisclosed company, and has forged strategic alliances with Swiss systems integration consultant Comit Gruppe, among others.
Researcher Larry Tabb, CEO of Westborough, Massachusettsbased Tabb Group and author of a recent report on grid computing, cautions that the concept is still in its infancy. “I’ve seen RIF, and it’s pretty cool, but that was a demo,” says Tabb. “Indra should be very good for Enigmatec as it tries to become a significant player in financial markets and beyond.” -- J.K.
