In addition to supporting U.S. Reg T and portfolio margin requirements, Margin Advisor is now able to support cross-margining of futures with index options in a risk-based, global environment. The multi-currency Margin Advisor solution is also now able to produce strategy- and risk-based credit and margin calculations for both European and U.S. financial institutions.

Gerard Murphy, president of SunGard's brokerage and clearance solutions business, said, "Margin Advisor delivers workflow, event management and modeling to help firms manage credit and margin risk. It provides both European and U.S. firms with the ability to handle combined futures and options margin treatment within the same securities account. It also meets the increasing demand from European firms in particular for a global solution with the ability to apply both risk- and strategy- based margin or credit calculations. SunGard is committed to the ongoing development of the global capabilities of all of its brokerage solutions."

Margin Advisor provides a single, fully integrated credit monitoring and management solution that goes beyond risk-based haircut calculations for U.S. market makers to provide added flexibility and scalability in helping European firms perform frequent intraday risk measurements, risk analysis and annualized volatility on individual instruments. Margin Advisor supports a broad range of instruments, highlights critical activity as it occurs, helps reduce human error, and performs modeling scenarios.

Leveraging functionality from other SunGard solutions such as Global Margin Server, MicroHedge, Synapse and Stream, Margin Advisor provides brokers with a single global platform for monitoring and managing credit and margin risk across asset classes. This functionality augments Margin Advisor with margin calculation capability using Standardized Portfolio Analysis of Risk (SPAN) margin methods for exchanges worldwide. It also provides intra-day theoretical pricing and impplied volatility data for listed US equity options, and a reliable method for brokers to define specific business rules and components of their credit policies. As a back-office agnostic solution delivered on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) basis, Margin Advisor provides additional straight-through processing capabilities when combined with transaction processing solutions such as SunGard's Phase3 and GMI, using SunGard's Stream for consolidating transactional data from disparate back office applications.