Charles River IMS is a comprehensive software suite for portfolio management (Charles River Manager), order management and trading (Charles River Trader), and real-time securities compliance (Charles River Compliance). The CameronFIX Engine is a highly scalable implementation of the Financial Information Exchange (FIX) protocol, the messaging standard developed specifically for the real-time electronic exchange of securities transactions, which provides comprehensive support for workflows including IOIs, orders, lists, executions, and allocations.

Charles River will embed the CameronFIX Engine within Charles River IMS to ensure seamless interaction between the systems. The tight integration of the products will result in transparent conversion of trade data from Charles River IMS into the appropriate FIX messages and facilitate downstream trade processing with an investment organization’s chosen counterparties. Portfolio managers and traders will benefit from an ability to easily monitor connections, maintain a real-time audit trail, and send and receive thousands of messages per second directly from the Charles River IMS blotter.

"We selected the CameronFIX Engine after an extensive evaluation process of a dozen products during which CameronFIX consistently outperformed others on our shortlist. The CameronFIX architecture, connection flexibility, and ease of customization proved to be the best fit with our technology," said Arnold Wachs, product manager at Charles River.

"Like Charles River IMS, the CameronFIX Engine is 100% Java-based, which supports a native integration between our systems. This connection produces inherent benefits for our customers such as order processing scalability, superior functionality, and consistently high performance," continued Wachs. "Charles River has always been a pioneer in providing integrated FIX connectivity solutions and our agreement with CameronFIX allows us to continue that leadership."

Charles River IMS v7.2 supports FIX 4.0 through 4.2 and FIX-based fixed income allocations with MarketAxess and TradeWeb. Charles River IMS will support FIX 4.4 in its upcoming v8.0 release as well as FIX-based equity allocations and FIX-based FX trades and allocations.

"We are very pleased Charles River Development’s 120+ clients will be able to take advantage of the CameronFIX engine," says John Cameron, Cameron Systems Chief Technology Officer. "Over the past seven years we have worked hard to develop the world’s best FIX technology. Similarly, Charles River is moving to the forefront of FIX connectivity with support for FIX-based equity, fixed income, and FX transactions. We look forward to working with Charles River to increase the adoption of FIX, and are pleased to be part of a solution that brings productivity and performance benefits to the investment management marketplace."

Charles River will ship the CameronFIX Engine as a component of Charles River IMS v8.0 at no additional cost to clients in the fourth quarter of this year. Current Charles River clients will be able to take advantage of the CameronFIX engine through a software upgrade to Charles River IMS v8.0. The upgrade will not require a re-implementation or changes to current connectivity or workflow. Charles River will also offer clients the option to adopt Cameron’s 'High Availability' FIX engine, which includes added support for disaster recovery.