SIA SHOW: Princeton Financial Develops Trade-Matching Interface

Princeton Financial Systems has developed an interface that will allow its clients to link their PAM portfolio-management and accounting systems to Omgeo Oasys Global via Omgeo AutoMatch.

Oasys Global is an electronic-trade-allocation and confirmation service, which compares trade details submitted by broker/dealers, on one end, with an investment managers' trade details, in this case submitted through PAM, on the other. AutoMatch is an automatic-matching service used by institutional investors. Buy-side firms feed trade details from their trade-capture systems into AutoMatch, which automatically attempts to match them to broker details as they are received through Oasys Global.

John Kuhn, Princeton Financial product manager, says that although Omgeo's Central Trade Manager, which is not yet available, will require a completely new real-time interface, Princeton did not want to wait. PFS, instead, decided to build the interface for its non-U.S. clients so they would have a link with the batch-processing Oasys Global.

"There was an interest in the international side to have a solution that could be used in the U.K. and Australia -- overseas. We had interfaced to TradeSuite and to FMCNet and we felt that those were either more U.S. centric or North America centric so we needed to have an ETC (electronic-trade confirmation) for international clients," says Kuhn. "The idea is that there is not just one solution. There will be multiple and we needed to give clients options."

Some of those clients, which were active on Oasys, had to build their own means of getting data from PAM to AutoMatch and thus lost out on some of the tracking benefits PAM offers, which will be realized with Princeton's newly built interface.

"If they used Oasys Global before, there was not a clean way to (get data out of PAM). They would have had to build a customized interface to take it out of PAM. It's a lot different now," says Kuhn.

He says that, with the new interface, trade-tracking capabilities in PAM will tell clients what information bas been sent out and what corrections to faulty trades are being made.

Princeton also plans to develop an interface to the Global Straight Through Processing Association's Transaction Flow Manager.

The goal, says Kuhn, is to have a solution for post-trade matching that can suit clients all along the technology spectrum. From sending SWIFT messages to custodians, which he describes as the most basic level of automation, to interacting with trading partners and banks through the new CTM/TFM matching models.