Sifma Technology Conference Review
Intel, Microsoft Help Boost BancWare Performance | Derivatives Complicate Enterprise Data Management: | IM Gets Collaborative | Siemens Debuts Open-Architecture Trading System | AOL Addresses Trading With FinAIM | Sales and Trading Supervision a Major Compliance Concern | Algorithms Join Buddy Lists
AOL Addresses Trading With FinAIM
June 25, 2007
The effort is a result of AOL's November 2006 acquisition of Relegence, a provider of real-time news- and data-scanning services to financial services companies. FinAIM will enable traders to place orders with counterparties. The system comes with federated security and user authentication to ensure external communications are done with legitimate counterparties.
Until now, IM-supported trading evolved out of the popularity of AIM and other services. Later, vendors such as Pivot Solutions entered; it worked in partnership with AOL to develop IMTrader. FinAIM represents AOL's first direct targeting of the trading community.
"There are companies like Pivot and LiquidityBook, who provide the ability for users to place orders using the AIM network, but they're still sitting on top of our network," said Chandran Rajan, technical director of products and professional services at AOL Relegence. "Us being AOL, we have this robust network, and we own it, so we can provide better software, especially with things like placing orders over the network. We can make sure those are swift and compliant."
AOL Relegence clients include Merrill Lynch, UBS, Credit Suisse and Citigroup, said Rajan.
"We realized all these compliance issues like logging and archiving were already addressed by firms like FaceTime and Akonix," Rajan conceded. "But that had been primarily within the enterprise. ... Now, if you work for a buy-side firm like Fidelity, when you log into FinAIM, Fidelity is federated with FinAIM, so you can use your screen name, and Fidelity would send that screen name to us using corporate mapping, so we show a check mark on [the counterparties'] buddy list showing that this guy truly is who he says he is."
AOL has partnerships with FaceTime Communications, Akonix Systems, Markit Group and other IM solutions and features providers, and does protocol translations and gives federated access for communications with other IM services. "If your enterprise is using Jabber and you want to send a message to Reuters IM, we can provide a gateway, whereby you send a package to us, and you can deliver to Reuters IM," Rajan said.
He added that AOL has been talking to exchanges--he couldn't reveal which--"that say they prefer solutions from AOL, because they like AOL's breadth of service and ownership of the network," in contrast to third-party providers.
When FinAIM is generally available, regular AIM users will be able to download a plug-in that will automatically authenticate and authorize them to access trading features, such as placing orders via IM.
