The contract follows the decision by Williams de Broë to outsource settlement processing of its non-discretionary private client and institutional operations to a New York based service bureau run by ADP/Wilco. Benefits of the decision to outsource include large cost savings, as well as a better service to the stockbroking firm's clients and traders, by streamlining its settlement and IT operations.

The m35 Platform plays an integral role in the success of the implementation by making sure that information access and financial data transfer between the two continents takes place seamlessly. The m35 Platform achieves this by providing a myriad of integration technologies - including Sybase, SQL Server, MQSeries, sockets, transformation services and file manipulation - with support for processing in both real-time and batch modes.

Other benefits of the m35 Platform implemented for this project include STP and service health monitoring, price and exchange rate downloads, regulatory and internal reporting functions, as well as client confirmation automated faxing and document management.

"The m35 Platform allowed us a great amount of flexibility in integrating our disparate systems which run on many different platforms," says Jane Hills, development manager for Williams de Broë, "This flexibility has allowed us to take full advantage of functionality provided by the service bureau as well as to mitigate risk to the business by giving us a coherent centralised control of our financial data."

Russ Thornton, principal of m35, says, "While outsourcing provides financial services companies with many advantages, it dramatically increases the integration and IT complexity. This has a direct impact on the IT group that is supposed to reap the benefits of outsourcing with decreased support requirements, not increased! The m35 Platform provides the IT team with a very powerful, easy to use integration solution that lets them take control of their outsourced environment."