by David Eaton, VP marketing and communications, IRIS Financial Solutions

The middle-office of the world's tier 1 banks was once a well defined place: relatively low trade volumes made high touch manual processing a realistic option. The middle-office could keep pace with the front-office and harmony reigned.

However, recently the middle-office has become a far more critical factor in the profit making equation of these large banks. Trade volumes have skyrocketed causing a constantly growing backlog in the middle-office. Trades are slow to settle and money is being lost.

A Shout for Help

Not only is the middle-office clamouring for help - the front office is demanding it. Along with explosive growth in trade volumes, service requirements are becoming increasingly complex in parallel with the mandate to keep costs low. Increased growth must be matched with 100% client satisfaction. At the same time, margins are decreasing to the point where if a trade needs inspecting or correcting, you've already lost money. Essentially, as the list of must-haves gets deeper, the field of those who can help seems to shrink.

There are clear functional and tactical problems that must be addressed: these mega-firms must be able to aggregate, allocate, and confirm trades across multiple desks. Bookings volumes are staggering compared to the recent past - with some broker/dealers processing more than one million trades per day. In fact, the LSE was recently quoted as citing that March saw new highs indaily peak volumes, in some cases more than 42% higher. All this equals a sharp increase in automation - moving from a hightouch manual environment to a low-touch exceptions-based approach. And, solutions must be able to scale far into the future.

This mandate is squeezing out many more contenders who come to the table with a rigid, hard-coded approach that would meet needs today, but leave tomorrow's requirements in question.

Opportunity: A New Breed of Solution

With this growth and the cry for help from tier 1 front- and middle-offices has come tremendous market opportunity for the vendoror vendors that can meet these demands. At Iris Financial Solutions, we seized this opportunity anddeveloped the next generation of trade management and processing solution: Iris Trade Manager.

Iris Trade Manager: the Comprehensive, Flexible Solution

From the start, we realized that the key was to bring a comprehensive solution to market, giving customers what they need from day one.

Complete Feature Set

Iris Trade Manager enables firms to significantly increase the profitability of trading operations by providing a single solution approach for multi-asset trade management and processing, including automated block, DMA, and baskettrade capture and processing, allocation management, confirmation, ticketing, figuration and audit trail generation.

Multi-Asset

Iris Trade Manager was created from the start as a multi asset solution, handling the range of equity, fixed income, and FX instruments.

Fully Configurable for the Technologist and the Business User

Configurability has generally meant significant interventionfrom IT staff or from your vendor.

We've changed this: we've made configurability something that happens across all levels of our solution. We put the power into the hands of the end-user and enable them to make meaningful, deep changes to the application. They can meet quickly changing conditions within their business environment without waiting for outside help and incurring additional costs.

Plays Well with Others

Iris Trade Manager fits into a trading environment exactly as our customers need it to. We work the way you want us to. Our solution is modular: you take the parts you need, plug them into the parts of your existing solution that work well, and end up with your dream result.

We Make Money for Our Customers

We have a simple aim: we want to help you make more money. Iris Trade Manager is an elegant solution to enable your trading operations to do just that.

Automate Trade Allocations and Trade Processing

It's straightforward: remove manual intervention, speed processing, and eliminate bottlenecks and you'll make more money faster.

One Great Solution is Easier than Many Partial Choices

While we work well with your existing application infrastructure, we give you as much as we can in a single solution. We cover all the asset classes, we offer the widest range of trade management functionality, and we process the heaviest volumes at the most rapid pace in the industry.