Order management vendor Charles River Development and fixed income marketplace TradeWeb have linked their systems to offer investment managers a straight-through processing (STP) solution for the complete trade cycle.
The two firms says the interface provides clients with a fixed income workflow solution, from "what if" analysis and pre-trade compliance straight through to electronic trade execution, allocation, and confirmation.
William Sullivan, managing director, Putnam Investments believes the link will provide benefits in terms of time savings, error reduction, and increased operational efficiency.
He says: "Now, for the first time, investment managers will be able to originate a fixed-income trade in an OMS, seamlessly route it electronically for execution, receive an electronic confirmation back in the OMS, and conduct paperless trade allocations and settlement without re-keying data."
John Sadowski, manager of fixed income operations, T Rowe Price, agrees. "The interface offers significant operational advantages," he says. "The lack of human intervention reduces the potential for errors and since we won't have to re-key data, we can increase our operational efficiencies,"
The link is achieved via TradeWeb's TradeXpress API via FIX and will be released commercially in early 2003 to joint TradeWeb and Charles River clients.