The unprecedented combination of VoIP and financial terminal is believed to set a new industry standard as it gives a definitive communications experience among investment communities, who embrace cost-effective means to enable instant intelligence and information sharing.

"Investors are indispensable to information-based tools and effective communications means to make informed decisions. Traditionally, a lot of time and efforts are spent to gather information from multiple channels, while communicating through different devices at a cost," said Dr. George Yu, Finet's chairman and CEO. "By making VoIP available on a cross-market financial terminal, Finet becomes an industry first to integrate the two decision-critical elements – information and voice communications – onto a single platform, promising unlimited connectivity to the investment communities worldwide and creating a new era in mobilizing people, capital and information in the global marketplace."

The initial release of VoIP service on Finet PowerStation is featured with high-quality voice calls between terminals and robust instant messaging via terminal, email or telephones, in a fully encrypted environment to ensure secure, ubiquitous information exchange. Financial institutions, dealers and investment communities are among the first to benefit from this synchronized model. For example, dealers can see Finet PowerStation as a virtual dealing room to instantly identify buyers or sellers, while concurrently monitoring real-time market movements. Brokers can build up relationships and even close orders with their clients, empowered by a repository of cross-market financial information. The product also allows versatile user grouping to support open, secure communications between various parties.

The economics is equally compelling. With VoIP built in a proprietary technology, Finet PowerStation enables users calling between widely dispersed locations for free, thus cutting a major chunk of telephony costs especially intensive in the highly mobilized financial sector. Additionally, downloading and maintenance efforts are streamlined with the two conventionally disparate systems now centralized onto a single platform. After a one-off downloading process on a computer, users just need an Internet connection and one set of logon and password to fully utilize the product.

Dr. Yu commented, "While VoIP is without doubt an awe-inspiring technology that revolutionizes communications, Finet takes a step forward to marry it with our core information capabilities and industry knowledge in order to create enormous synergies for investors around the world. It is simply integral to our customer-centric legacy and unique capacity to interconnect information, technology and services. In return, we expect this unrivalled combination, first-of-its-kind, will further anchor our existing users and expand our customer base to a new level."

Future releases will extend IP-based calls to connect between terminals and telephones, adding multimedia and graphical features to bring greater values to broader market segments.

"As an industry pioneer, Finet is driven to transform latest technologies into new business ventures that accelerate our organic growth. The momentous VoIP technology, which is bound to alter the status quo that people communicate, presents an exceptional opportunity to open up new markets for us. With the growing sophistication and popularity of our VoIP service, our goal is to venture into a new line of business to particularly address the needs of Chinese users, which remains an uncharted market to date," Dr. Yu added.