Impendium Systems, a global provider of operations solutions for investment banks, announces the launch of “Ice”, an out of the box interest claims engine to generate and reclaim lost revenue across all cash and securities trades.
Powered by Portrait Foundation, Ice provides a unique solution to problems which have plagued Capital Markets and Treasury organisations for decades - the loss of millions of dollars in revenue each year due to deficient technology and manual revenue recovery processes, and the inability to minimise liabilities caused by internal errors within the organisation.
The Ice application captures and calculates all payable and receivable interest claims across multiple products. It also provides the framework for all the risk and compliance data now being demanded by the industry regulators. Ice's powerful functionality significantly increases revenue recovery, provides trading and sales with the correct allocations of profit and loss and minimises external costs from internal errors. Markets previously considered uneconomical such as equities and corporate banking can now achieve further efficiencies without additional expense.
A major European Investment Bank is the first organisation to adopt Ice. Ice's functionality will facilitate additional revenue generating opportunities for the bank not usually achievable within Operations, delivering millions of dollars of revenue benefit for them in the first year alone. In addition, the transparency and reporting will enable the bank to centralise commoditised processes, allowing specialists to add real value elsewhere.
Ice is the first of a family of products to be jointly developed and marketed by Impendium and Portrait Software. Initial marketing has resulted in strong levels of interest from existing customers and global partners.
Stuart Clark, Impendium Global Product Manager commented, "Due to the complexity and the poor quality of static data within organisations and despite having large operational teams to manage exceptions from trade execution to confirmation matching and settlement, most organisations are lucky to achieve a 90% settlement efficiency rate. As margins in investment banking ever diminish so the need to ensure that profit actually hits the balance sheet becomes increasingly critical to the long term success of the organisation. We're confident that Ice is uniquely well designed to assist companies in achieving this goal."
Recent market research has identified that the automation of manual processes by brokerage firms and the replacement of proprietary applications with off-the-shelf packages as being a key driver in IT spending growth. For example, TowerGroup predicts that total spending on derivatives software and services alone by global capital markets institutions is expected to increase from $3.6bn in 2006 to $5.75bn by 2009, a compound annual growth rate of 18%.
Nick Randall, CEO of Portrait Software plc, commented, "As one of the leaders in operations solutions for treasury and investment banking, Impendium have strong domain expertise in this growth market which we can tap into via this partnership with them. This seven figure first order received for ICE is a great endorsement of the power of the product."
Rory McLaren, Technical Director of Impendium added, "We're delighted to have worked with Portrait Software on the development of ICE. With Portrait Foundation many of the essential components of front-end applications are already done, leaving us to focus on designing superior operational processes based on our expertise in investment banking. We look forward to introducing further unique solutions to the market with Portrait over the coming year."