Waters EuroFIT awards - The Best of Europe

The inaugural Waters EuroFIT awards recognize Europe's hottest financial IT products and services. By the Editors

Innovation does not stop in an economic crisis. Slowing down development of trading tools and mission-critical technologies is a death sentence for capital markets firms. Although some indicators say the worst of the recession is over, we still have long way to go. Until then, sober observers note that firms must still innovate in order to see the sun shine after the deluge.

That is why Waters is pleased to announce the first installment of the European Financial Information Technology-EuroFIT-awards for the best financial IT products and services used by European investment firms large and small. With these awards, Waters heralds the innovative solutions that have served European investment firms so well.

Waters established 11 categories that range from best interbroker dealer to best crossing network. From best cloud computing provider to best outsourcing firms, the EuroFITs shine a spotlight on the tools and services that will help Europe emerge from the recession's vice-like grip. We chose the winners based on the maturity of their offerings, their leadership in their respective fields and the strength of their positions going forward in this unforgiving landscape.

Chosen by the editors of Waters with a little help from sibling publication Dealing with Technology, the winners of the inaugural EuroFIT are true leaders. As these awards are chosen by the editors, of course, there will be differences of opinions from the vendors that did not come in first and from the European firms that we had in mind when choosing the roster of winners. We welcome their comments and hope to use their insights for next year's round of EuroFITs. To spread the honors, Waters has added an Honorable Mention in most categories for those IT vendors that have done excellent work this year.

Congratulations to the winners of the 2009 EuroFITs.

Best Clearinghouse

LCH Clears Up

Honorable Mention: EMCF

Clearinghouses have been thrust into the spotlight over the last 12 months and experienced an explosion in activity. Instruments with no centralized clearing facilities, such as loans, credit default swaps (CDSes), and over-the-counter (OTC) equity derivatives, were charged with having helped plunge the world into economic turmoil, prompting regulatory bodies across Europe to promote greater use of clearing to help ward off future financial crises.

Now, of course, financial watchdogs are eyeing clearing once more, though this time because of concerns that increased interoperability between clearinghouses might actually amplify, rather than curb, risks to the economy.

These fears were, in part, brought to the fore by initiatives from Europe's biggest independent clearinghouse, LCH.Clearnet. The London-based firm has done more than any other to advance the interoperability model espoused by the European Commission (EC), and was primarily responsible for teasing out recent objections from UK and Holland regulators that were leery of offering an opinion until close to seeing the issue in action. Accordingly, several industry observers argue that the clearinghouse has performed something of a service to the industry, even if some of the recent hard work and development will be put on ice for now.

This focus on innovation was key in the selection of LCH.Clearnet as winner of the Best Clearinghouse award in the 2009 EuroFITs.

The move toward pan-European clearing and settlement, which attracted so much scrutiny from the authorities, made up a large chunk of LCH.Clearnet's activity this year, as it attempted to deliver EC goals of greater efficiency, lower cross-border trading costs and a wider choice when it came to clearers. LCH.Clearnet signed a master link agreement to achieve interoperability with the European Multilateral Clearing Facility (EMCF) and offer trading participants on multilateral trading facilities (MTFs) Chi-X and Bats Europe a choice of where their UK and Swiss equity trades are cleared. It was also selected to clear for NYSE Euronext's MTF NYSE Arca Europe, and for investment bank-owned alternative trading platform Turquoise, after agreeing interoperability deals with their respective central counterparties.

Moreover, LCH.Clearnet broadened its scope in less traditional markets, confirming its launch of clearing in the wholesale OTC bullion market for members of the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA). It also extended its global lead in clearing for carbon emissions trading by broadening its OTC clearing service to include the UK-based spot market for carbon credits. It even launched a clearing service for iron ore swaps.

EMCF wins the honorable mention in this category. The Dutch clearinghouse announced a number of interoperability initiatives as well, and has quadrupled average volumes since last year.

Best Cloud Provider

Amazon Rules the Cloud

Honorable Mention: IBM

The cloud computing phenomenon has mushroomed in the last year. What was a fringe concept known only to whiz kids and technology geeks has entered the mainstream and is finding a foothold in finance. Cloud computing is a natural extension of the application server provider (ASP) solutions the financial world has seen for years. It builds on the advances made in grid computing that have had Wall Street buzzing with the possibilities of parallelization. But it goes further and deeper than either of those paradigms.

Wall Street is still grappling with how to best tap cloud computing. As discussed at the recent Waters Power events in London and New York, security concerns are still prevalent. Guaranteeing the robustness and security of a third party's servers is naturally fraught with problems. But just as many-initially smaller, but now also larger-financial firms have become comfortable with using trading, settlement or compliance applications delivered via the ASP model. So, too, will they eventually come to trust applications and databases where their sensitive data and programming logic is stored in the cloud.

The overwhelming leader in this field is Amazon-an early embracer of cloud technology. Having successfully transformed its own Web site from a transaction-only Web 1.0 online store for buying books and music into a thriving Web 2.0 community for buying and selling almost anything, and for sharing opinions and reviews on the products offered, the vendor realized the potential for sharing its massive datacenter resources. What was a secondary business has fast grown into a major revenue source.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) includes infrastructure services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides resizable compute capacity within the cloud and offers on-demand billing so users only pay for the capacity they use. Data storage and database facilities are also offered-Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon SimpleDB, respectively. Amazon SimpleDB provides the core database functions of data indexing and querying in the cloud, eliminating the costly and time-consuming process of designing and administering a Web-scale database, and enabling developers to focus on application development.

AWS also offers a virtual private cloud, Amazon VPC, which serves as a bridge between a firm's existing IT infrastructure and the AWS cloud, enabling enterprises to connect their existing infrastructure to a set of isolated AWS compute resources via a virtual private network (VPN) connection.

Technology giant IBM receives an honorable mention for its offering in the cloud computing space. IBM's Smart Business cloud solutions include testing tools to improve and streamline clients' testing environments, analytics solutions to quickly deliver business intelligence, cloud-based storage and archiving for all types of information and business needs, as well as immediately scalable compute capacity on demand.

Best Compliance Technology Provider

Oracle Mantas Is Number One for Compliance

Honorable Mention: Actimize

In the year following the collapse of Lehman Brothers, few things have been more important to financial services firms than governance, risk and compliance technology. At conferences and webinars, analysts and experts have extolled the virtues of competent risk management systems and bashful CEOs have made spending on risk technology a priority, even as they have scaled down other areas of spending and closed some struggling lines of business entirely.

In the 2009 inaugural EuroFIT awards, Oracle Mantas was voted the Best Compliance Technology Provider in the European markets.

Oracle Mantas is a global leader in this field, having also won the US-focused Waters Rankings award for Best Anti-Money Laundering (AML) Compliance for the third year running earlier this year.

The Oracle Mantas AML solution provides automated, comprehensive, and consistent surveillance of all accounts, customers, correspondents, and parties external to a transaction across all business lines. It enables financial firms, including banks, brokerage firms, and insurance companies to monitor customer transactions on a daily basis, and using customer historical information and account profiles, it provides a holistic view of all transactions and activities. The solution also enables financial firms to comply with federal and international regulatory mandates by providing an enhanced level of internal controls and governance.

Integrated with the AML solution is the Oracle Mantas Know Your Customer offering, which helps to ensure that firms understand their customers and their associated risk and can take immediate action when events occur that affect a customer's risk profile.

But Oracle Mantas compliance products extend beyond just AML solutions. Its suite of products also includes an Enterprise Fraud Monitoring solution, which uses complex behavior detection analytics to identify and alert management to suspicious activity within an organization. It also includes a Trader Compliance solution, which monitors trading patterns for abuse and ensures adherence to regulatory trading guidelines and best execution requirements.

And last month, responding to one of the most dominant problems of the financial crisis, Oracle announced a new financial services solution for enterprise-wide stress testing, enabling financial institutions to respond to challenges of capital adequacy and help guard against future threats to liquidity.

Delivered using the Oracle Reveleus Advanced Analytics Infrastructure, the stress-testing solution enables institutions to centrally develop, define and manage scenarios and shocks-and apply them across multiple risk categories, including credit risk and market risk-to help provide a transparent and auditable means of performing regulatory and economic capital estimation.

The solution enables firms to perform stress testing at the enterprise level rather than in traditional siloed risk disciplines, which provides a limited and ultimately flawed assessment of risk.

New York-based compliance vendor Actimize was given an honorable mention in this category for its compliance and fraud detection software.

Best Crossing Network

ITG Crosses Finish Line First

Honorable Mention: Liquidnet

In these days of transparency, a little anonymity goes a long way. Crossing networks allow investment firms to place large block trade orders either anonymously or directly to other members without changing the public quote. When it comes to crossing networks in Europe, one name leads the pack: Posit from Investment Technology Group (ITG). Launched in the US in 1987 and in Europe in 1998, Posit is a trusted crossing network that offers unique liquidity. Operating for more than a decade, Posit is the buy side's source for anonymity.

The Posit crossing network is adaptable enough to fit a variety of trading styles and methodologies from active to passive and even quantitative. It offers both buyers and sellers the chance to match equity orders with no impact on the market or the firm's bottom line. ITG claims that not only does it offer diverse, high-quality liquidity, and portfolio controls to manage risk; it is ideal for large blocks and small illiquid names. In these days of lowering risk profiles, Posit does just that. ITG officials say that Posit generates neither information leakage nor market impact, and that its portfolio controls improve sector balancing and allow for tracking error and dollar or share constraints.

ITG has not let the economic crisis hamper its slate of offerings. In March of this year, the agency broker and technology provider made Posit available to execute equity trades from the Czech Republic, Hungary and South Africa. Posit is now open to 20 countries in EMEA including Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland. Posit also covers the London Stock Exchange's International Order Book, which is made up of stocks from over 30 markets, including Poland, Russia and Turkey. This brings the tally of stocks covered by Posit to more than 14,000.

The expansion to the new areas is in response to clients' increased interest in emerging markets, Belinda Keheyan, director, head of international marketing at ITG, told Dealing with Technology earlier this year. "As clients use more electronic systems and become more sophisticated, we've added more venues," she says. Every year, new countries and new types of crosses are incorporated into Posit, says Keheyan, adding that between 200 and 300 of ITG's clients use Posit. The suite of products includes Posit Alert, which notifies users of trading opportunities; Posit Now, which offers continuous crossing; and Posit Match, with scheduled matches throughout the trading day. Firms can access Posit from the ITG Dark Algorithm and a variety of ITG front ends, such as the Triton execution management system and the ITG Channel, as well as FIX and directly from the client's own order management system.

Honorable mention goes to block crossing network Liquidnet, which earlier this year signed an interconnectivity agreement with EuroFIT winner Chi-X Europe.

Best Dark Pool

SmartPool Surfaces First

Honorable Mention: Chi-Delta

Honorable

It is appropriate to call 2009 the year of the dark pool. Numerous startups have mushroomed into existence, creating a highly competitive marketplace, and no shortage of controversy. But many believe the market cannot support all the new arrivals, and the race is now on to provide the kind of value-rich and sophisticated dark environments that will tempt buy-side firms to shell out their hard-earned cash. SmartPool did this better than any other, having fought off strong competition to claim the title of Best Dark Pool in the 2009 EuroFITs.

It has been quite a year for SmartPool. Created by NYSE Euronext in partnership with JPMorgan, HSBC and BNP Paribas, the neutral dark liquidity pool received approval from the UK Financial Services Authority (FSA) to launch dark pool block trading in European stocks in January, and began trading on Feb. 2. In May, Lee Hodgkinson assumed the role of CEO, replacing acting CEO Yvette Roozenbeek. In July, another 14 investment firms became members of SmartPool, including Credit Suisse, UBS, Nomura, Instinet, Investment Technology Group (ITG), Knight Capital Europe, RBS-ABN Amro Bank NV, and Neonet.

SmartPool shares both the technology and infrastructure of its founder, exchange operator NYSE Euronext. Moreover, the trading environment's neutrality is guaranteed by NYSE Euronext's operation of the trading platform on behalf of SmartPool.

At launch, SmartPool began a phased introduction, making approximately 1,000 stocks from 15 European countries available for trading. Markets include the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the Nordic regions.

In August, an expansion into trading pan-European mid-cap securities was announced, and the following month, the range of products was expanded to include all constituents of the FTSE 250, FTSE Italia Mid Cap, mid-cap constituents of the Dow Jones STOXX 600, MDAX in Germany and the Swiss SMIM. The existing blue-chip range of securities was also extended to reflect the leading indices of the 15 European equity markets traded on SmartPool, including securities listed on the four NYSE Euronext markets. Trades are cleared via LCH.Clearnet for Euronext-listed stocks, and EuroCCP for all other European markets.

The honorable mention in this category goes to Chi-Delta, the standalone order book launched by fellow Waters EuroFIT winner, multilateral trading facility (MTF) Chi-X Europe.

Unveiled in May, the Chi-Delta dark pool runs in parallel to the existing Chi-X visible order book and uses the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID) reference price waiver for pre-trade transparency for non-displayed orders which do not meet the "large-in-scale" order size requirements of MiFID.

Best Datacenter Hosting Provider

Savvis Steps Up

Honorable Mention: Equinix

It is no secret that the last 12 months has been tough on the financial community. The economic downturn has created challenges for almost every section of the capital markets, but an increasingly cost-conscious climate also created a significant degree of momentum behind IT outsourcing. Meanwhile, cloud computing continued its upward trajectory and the IT infrastructure landscape became increasingly standardized and homogenous. These trends, coupled with an ever increasing appetite for co-location, meant that demand for datacenter services continued to outpace supply. The obvious beneficiaries were the hosting providers, many of which made major strides in capitalizing on this rapidly growing area of the market.

However, few did so more than the winner of the Best Datacenter Hosting Provider EuroFIT, Savvis. When it comes to the financial services community, Savvis is a commonly heard name. Of approximately 4,200 customers served by its global infrastructure, it counts seven of the top 10 Fortune 500 financial services and banking firms. Analysts also rate it highly, and it has been positioned in the leaders section of Gartner's Magic Quadrant market analysis for managed hosting, as well as Web hosting and hosted cloud system infrastructure services.

Savvis entered the European marketspace in 2004, however Savvis' European activities were brought to the fore in October 2008, when it opened the doors of a new 37,500 square-foot datacenter in Slough, on the outskirts of London.. This signaled the completion of a global expansion plan that involved the construction of eight new facilities in less than two years and brought the Missouri-based vendor's datacenter footprint to 1.43 million square foot. The new center marked the vendor's entrance into the European managed hosting and co-location markets and was built to address the growth in customer demand, which Savvis had been experiencing in the UK.

Savvis secured new business in 2009: Bats Global Markets recently announced that it would be expanding its footprint within the Savvis Docklands datacenter in London in preparation for continued growth of the Bats Europe multilateral trading facility (MTF). Moreover, Thomson Reuters announced a major development of its hosting platform with a global initiative to provide high-performance liquidity discovery and execution support in collaboration with Savvis.

The honorable mention in this category goes to Equinix, which has also had a busy year. It continued an aggressive $1.4 billion expansion plan begun in 2007, announcing plans to build a 48,400 square-foot datacenter in Geneva, as well as a 12,920 square-foot facility in Zurich. It also confirmed that NYSE Liffe is now offering cross-connect access from Equinix's International Business Exchange datacenter in Frankfurt, while Chi-X Europe has joined the Equinix Financial Exchange, which is located within the same facility.

Best Interdealer Broker

BGC Deals and Wins

Honorable Mention: Icap

Despite the recession, BGC Partners has had a good year. The interdealer broker separated from Cantor Fitzgerald in 2004 and listed on Nasdaq in 2008. BGC's US Treasury business accounts for the majority of its fully electronic volume-and overall this segment is expanding by leaps and bounds. The business grew by almost 24 percent from the first quarter to the second, after a 20 percent spike the previous quarter. BGC's credit business is also booming-at the end of the second quarter, it had grown over 30 percent since the previous year.

The interdealer broker has also expanded its staff-BGC currently has over 1,400 brokers, compared to fewer than 1,250 a year ago. Some 700 are in the UK and Europe, approximately 330 are in the US, and 370 are located throughout the rest of the world.

Technology plays a big role in the firm's success. BGC Partners has invested over $1 billion in technology since 1999, when it first listed its eSpeed technology platform on the Nasdaq Stock Market, and the firm has committed to spending $100 million annually on developing and maintaining its proprietary technology.

BGC continually adds functionality to its BGC Trader front end. Having rolled out fully electronic trading of foreign exchange (FX) options globally over the last 18 months, in July the firm added non-deliverable forwards (NDFs), outrights and NDF spreads in Latin American currencies. The platform was originally launched in 2006 and supports fixed income, European corporate cash, FX options and credit default swaps (CDSes).

In Europe this year, BGC has added a number of products to BGC Trader including US dollar sovereigns, UK gilts, and asset-backed and emerging markets CDSes. With the addition of new functionality, including Volume Match, Order Cancel Order (OCO) and Iceberg, the firm has continued its growth in fully electronic trading. By the end of this year there are plans to add Asian and Eastern European NDFs and European government bonds to the platform.

BGC Partners is the technology provider for ELX Futures, which launched in July this year. BGC Partners' eSpeed technology platform for ELX Futures enables maximum liquidity through a combination of high-speed execution and the number of participant firms currently connected to the system.

Participants connect to the ELX platform directly through the BGC Partners eSpeed proprietary application programming interface (API), through an independent software vendor (ISV) or via the FIX messaging protocol.

Every year on Sept. 11, BGC holds its annual star-studded charity day, where celebrities visit the firm's trading floor and help "finish" trades, and profits from the day's trading go to various charities.

The honorable mention in this category goes to Icap.

Best MTF

Chi-X Has the ‘X' Factor

Honorable Mention: Nasdaq OMX Europe

When the European Union's Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID) came into force two years ago, it heralded a move away from the traditionally entrenched trading model. Many observers forecasted an overarching trend toward fragmentation and a slew of upstart trading platforms competing with the incumbent exchanges. Nevertheless, few could have predicted that a startup multilateral trading facility (MTF) would wrestle market share away from the major exchanges and end up as one of the biggest participants in the European trading landscape. Chi-X did just that, and for that reason, Waters has chosen Chi-X Europe as winner of the Best MTF EuroFIT.

Since its launch in March 2007, 18 months ahead of any other MTF, Chi-X has consistently capitalized on its early lead and managed to stay head and shoulders above the competition. Not only has it now achieved a turnover of more than three times that of its closest MTF rival; it also has the second-highest market share of any other trading venue, including Euronext Paris, Deutsche Börse's Xetra trading system and Borsa Italiana in Milan, according to the Fidessa Fragmentation Index. For the week ending Oct. 16, Chi-X conducted over 3 million trades, netted a 14.47 percent share of the market in major European stocks, and achieved a turnover of €23,496,133 ($34,587,457). These figures were only slightly behind the London Stock Exchange's (LSE's) share of 14.91 percent and €24,208,524 ($35,636,131).

Instead of resting on its laurels, Chi-X has continued to launch new services and features. Most recently, it announced Chi-Velocity, a proximity-hosted risk management software layer co-located next to the Chi-X primary matching engine, which enables trading participant firms to offer ultra-low-latency, sponsored direct market access (DMA) to their end clients.

In September, it also inked an interconnectivity agreement with block trading MTF Liquidnet, which will allow customers of Chi-Vision-Chi-X's smart liquidity consolidation service-to execute against liquidity provided by Liquidnet's Supernatural strategy suite.

The European trading landscape is of course highly competitive. Honorable mention goes to Nasdaq OMX Europe, which claims to be the first platform to connect European liquidity pools with Pan-European routing. It trades approximately 800 securities including constituents of the main European indexes, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and other highly liquid securities.

Meanwhile, Bats Europe and Turquoise, thanks in part to an aggressive pricing war designed to lure cost-conscious traders away from the more established trading venues, have both consistently grown their market share to take their place in the mid-tier of exchanges. The MTFs, respectively, achieved 3.84 and 3.82 percent share in the market in major European stocks for the week ending Oct. 16.

Best Network Provider

BT Nets Top Provider Award

Honorable Mention: Savvis

It would seem that the financial meltdown has brought with it an era of frugality-and, quite frankly, distrust. Investment firms are pinching every penny and third-party service providers are being looked at with a skeptical eye. So in down times one can't help but look at some vendors and be enamored with their sheer scale. Take, for example, BT Group.

BT provides network support to the world's four largest banks, all top 10 global stock exchanges and the top 10 largest banks in Western Europe. Additionally, BT has invested some $20 billion into new IP-based architecture, according to the London-based vendor. And, for good measure, throw in a network of 10,500 financial sites, 50 global broker-dealers, nearly full-market share of the top 50 global asset managers and hedge funds, and 65,000 traders using a BT turret and it's easy to understand BT's worldwide impact.

The fact that so many rely on the UK's largest telecommunications provider is evidence of the trust that so many financial institutions have placed in BT during these tumultuous times. And this is why BT has been named Best Network Provider in the inaugural EuroFIT awards. Earlier this year, BT took the award for Best Hosting Provider for Waters' US-focused Rankings, which are chosen by the magazine's readers.

This year, BT announced a deal with Commerzbank to deliver and manage the ITS.Netrix voice trading system and ITS Recorder on the German giant's trading floors. The vendor also now provides IP-based connectivity to LCH.Clearnet Group through its Radianz service, and has signed an expansion of its relationship with List S.p.A to manage network and hosting services for the new e-MID Market platform, which services about 200 banks in 27 countries, using BT Radianz Shared Market Infrastructure.

In addition, through its 21^st Century Network (21CN) project, BT continues to turn the vendor's telecommunications infrastructure into a total IP-based network that will deliver broadband throughout the UK to all its customers, through a variety of devices.

Even investors appear to have a great deal of confidence in BT. After a difficult summer that saw its stock fall below £0.80 ($1.31), by far its lowest standing of the decade, BT Group is back trading in the £1.30 ($2.13) range, and Credit Suisse raised it to "outperform" from "neutral" with a price estimate of £1.70 ($2.79) for 2010.

Receiving the nod of honorable mention is Savvis, which unveiled its cloud solution, Project Spirit, this year, which will streamline both hosting and networking infrastructure capabilities. Project Spirit is currently in beta and will be rolled out to customers in early 2010. It will be the industry's first virtual private datacenter-a datacenter on demand, if you will-officials say.

Best Outsourcing Provider

Infosys Out in Front

Honorable Mention: Wipro

In a recession, investment firms keep a laser-like focus on their bottom line and CIOs must look at saving every IT dollar. Outsourcing IT projects and mission-critical functions to a third party has gained urgency like never before as we emerge from this economic crisis. With this in mind, Waters names Infosys the winner of the first ever Best Outsourcing Provider EuroFIT award. The Bangalore, India-based vendor is a clear leader in this field, having won the US-focused Waters Rankings award in this category for the last three years running.

The year 2009 has been an interesting time for the world's outsourcing providers. Revelations of a $1 billion accounting fraud at the very top of one of the mightiest providers-Satyam-at the beginning of the year threatened to undermine confidence in the massive outsourcing sector. Following the scandal, which earned Satyam the dubious accolade, "The Enron of India," after the firm's founder and chairman siphoned off $1 billion from the company's books, financial services firms the world over began to reexamine their existing outsourcing contracts and to seek new clauses to allow them to exit agreements more easily.

However, despite this rocky start, 2009 has not seen a decrease in outsourcing. Thanks to the ongoing financial crisis, many firms have increased their outsourcing activity rather than reduced it. Facing massive budget cuts and vastly trimmed down technology teams, firms have been forced to rely more heavily than ever on third-party providers. In some cases, financial services firms looking to reduce costs have relinquished control of their captive sites in India to third-party outsourcing providers, preferring to partner with them instead of running the sites themselves.

Cheap labor is no longer the main reason firms choose to outsource. And the substance has grown far beyond just testing and development. Faith in "domain expertise" within the outsourcing industry has also grown in recent years, and providers such as Infosys-once thought of as a pure technology enterprises-can now credibly claim to know as much about the financial services business as they do about technology.

Infosys' Banking and Capital Markets (BCM) practice offers a host of technology and business process outsourcing (BPO) solutions as well as a range of specific financial services applications. From accelerated testing and portfolio analysis solutions through payments and corporate actions to risk management and compliance tools, there are few areas in financial IT that Infosys does not cover.

As well as partnering with many tier-one financial services firms, Infosys' BCM practice also partners with independent software vendors (ISVs) such as FICO, SunTec, Axway and Gemstone, to provide end-to-end services for financial services firms. Within these partnerships, Infosys offers a comprehensive set of services, spanning the entire product engineering and implementation lifecycle.

The honorable mention for this year's inaugural EuroFIT awards goes to Wipro, also based in India. Wipro has partnered with major investment banks, investment management firms and stock exchanges worldwide for over 10 years, offering state-of-the-art technology solutions to address business priorities such as operational efficiency, cost optimization, revenue enhancement and regulatory compliance. Wipro offers expertise in asset management, brokerage and exchange domains.

Best Reconciliation Provider

SmartStream Settles It

Honorable Mention: SunGard

A trade is not done after the offer has been accepted and the order has been entered into the books. This is where reconciliation solution providers shine. In the age of high-frequency trading, the only thing more shocking than ultra-low latency is how often large-scale investment firms settle trades manually. Many of today's state-of-the-art banks are doing things the old-fashioned way: by hand.

Poorly settled transactions increase risk and doubt, leaving firms with an unclear picture of the post-trade status. In these days, no investment entity needs extra-and certainly unwanted-risk exposure.

In the category of Best Reconciliation Provider, the EuroFIT goes to Smart­Stream. When it comes to post-trade straight-through processing (STP) solutions from cash and securities processing through to derivatives exception management and investigation tools, SmartStream owns the market. The vendor leverages what it calls real-time Transaction Lifecycle Management (TLM) for investment firms looking to tame the STP beast. According to SmartStream, the vendor counts more than 1,000 financial services clients, including more than 75 of the world's top 100 banks.

SmartStream starts with TLM technology. An STP transaction processing solution on steroids, TLM creates scalable solutions that focus on integration and control in the post-trade environment of investment managers, broker-dealers, banks and custodians. It boasts enhanced operational control by consolidating fragmented and siloed infrastructures for equities, fixed income and derivatives, into a unified transaction processing platform that monitors and controls instruments across their lifecycle. It aims to lower operational risk through automated, workflow-based software that provides a full and audited view of all activity. Further, it delivers increased efficiency through pro-active monitoring that alerts clients to exceptions before they occur.

It has been a busy year for SmartStream, which has teamed up with Swift to allow Swift subscribers to use SmartStream TLM OnDemand reconciliation service. As a subscription offering, firms that rely on Swift infrastructure do not have to make any investment in software licenses and can be up and running in a matter of weeks. The Swift-integrated SmartStream service is a silver bullet that reduces transaction breaks, operational risk and time to process transactions.

Also, this fall the vendor released two new products: TLM Reconciliations-Premium, a new solution that delivers best-practice reconciliation models and enhanced scaling capability; TLM Corporate Actions, built on previous success in the event management processing space but introducing new levels of event processing flexibility and scalability; and DClear Utilities, a new division that provides shared data and trade processing utilities.

Also a leader in reconciliation solutions, SunGard wins the honorable mention. -->