Source: Interwoven
Interwoven, Inc. (Nasdaq: IWOV), provider of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions for business, announced today that it has signed its first contract to provide its Scrittura OTC Derivatives Solution to the Latin American financial services market, extending Interwoven's solution leadership within the investment industry.
The Interwoven solution enables global dealers and investment managers to drive a high volume of complex, time-sensitive trading operations from inception to clearance.
Interwoven's new client is one of the largest investment banks in Mexico, which has experienced rapid growth in its use of over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives. Derivatives are investments whose value is based on the value of underlying assets, such as commodities, stock indexes, or currencies. OTC derivatives are privately traded, instead of using a public stock exchange. The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) recently highlighted the "significant activity" of Mexico's OTC market in its Quarterly Review of December 2005. At the end of June 2005, the amount of all outstanding derivatives stood at $535 billion, almost twice as much as the previous year. BIS commented on "the increasing sophistication of the market" in Mexico, as investor appetite has shifted from "relatively simple instruments such as forwards to more complex contracts like options and currency swaps."
As the demand for OTC financial instruments has grown, regulators and investors in Latin America and worldwide have expressed concerns about these markets settling trades with manual processes that increase inefficiency and risk. Interwoven's Scrittura OTC Derivatives Solution addresses these anxieties by enabling institutions to increase the speed and efficiency with which trades are completed and reported, from days or weeks, to hours or minutes. By automating and validating the confirmation process from end-to-end, Interwoven’s solution helps firms reduce the risk associated with a backlog of unconfirmed and failed trades.
With Interwoven's OTC Derivatives Solution, financial organizations enable straight-through processing for financial instruments and can keep pace with high volumes of time-sensitive transactions and data-intensive documentation. In addition to automating and accelerating all parts of the trade confirmation process, the solution generates a full audit and reporting trail for regulatory compliance, litigation avoidance, and e-discovery. A major appeal of the solution to the Mexican bank was that the Interwoven solution integrated seamlessly with other applications to strengthen transaction processing and was implemented locally.
Jos Stoop, vice president and general manager of financial services solutions at Interwoven, commented: "We are pleased to announce our first contract in Mexico, an example of the growing adoption of Interwoven financial services solutions around the globe. As investors in Latin America maximize their returns by using increasingly complex financial instruments, Interwoven is meeting the resulting demand for the solutions to support these trades."