Morgan Stanley has launched Morgan Stanley Matrix, a new trading Web application for institutional clients that allows rich, real-time collaboration through chat, video, sharing of trade ideas and charts, and execution and trade allocation.
A team of 30 Flex developers, including contractors provided by Adobe Consulting, have been working on the application for the past year. It was built using Adobe's Flash Platform technologies, including the Flex framework. This technology, along with Microsoft Silverlight and Ajax, are increasingly being used to build what are known as Rich Internet Applications (RIA).
Initially Matrix offers coverage of vanilla interest rate derivatives and foreign exchange markets, but will soon extend to European government bonds and Eurex futures blocks. Eventually all products in the interest rate product suite will be included.
Morgan Stanley allowed developers to blog about the project last week when it launched a teaser microsite highlighting the features of the platform, which went live to clients yesterday.
Hishaam Mufti-Bey, Matrix founder and global director at Morgan Stanley says, "The hallmarks of what would become a disruptive rather than sustained innovation would be that it was simple, accessible and convenient for clients to use in order for them to adopt it."
The bank says that the information streams now available direct to clients, including video from its economists and trading desks, cover trade ideas and "colour" that it also distributes to its own sales team globally.
Other investment banks are also embracing Rich Internet Applications to improve the customer experience and provide rich data visualisation and communication tools to their institutional clients. For example, Barclays Capital last month launched Barclays Capital Live, which combines its acquired LehmanLive channel, the BARX electronic platform and technology from Caplin.