Reporting its financial results for the year, Gresham posted lower operating losses of £2.2 million for 2003, against £3.5 million in the year ago period. A 12% fall in revenues to £10.2 million was attributed largely to difficulites in the firm's contract staffing agency.

Shares in the vendor moved up up 4.5% to 386p, however, as the market priced in possible future gains from Gresham's involvement as the provider of application software to the C&W real-time nostro facility.

The project, which aims to deliver a central information repository for sharing nostro account information between financial institutions and other organisations, promises a steady future revenue stream from subscribers.

Andrew Walton-Green, chief executive officer of Gresham, says considerable progress has been made in the past year towards the commercial realisation of the service and the utility has now gone live utilising US Dollar information from JP Morgan Chase with the Royal Bank of Scotland as initial subscribers. Other subscribers lined up include Santander Central Hispano and Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, says Walton-Green, while future data providers comprise ANZ Bank, Barclays, Bangkok Bank, Mizuho Corporate Bank and RBC Global Services.

He says: "The group's principle focus remains on assisting Cable & Wireless to deliver the Cable & Wireless RTN service to the market. The live RTN service is a significant step towards achieving this goal."

Gresham's involvement in the service is having a beneficial knock-on effect of increasing market awareness of the group and its capabilities in the finance and banking sector. The firm says it has a number of developments underway to expand its systems integration services in the bank-to-bank and bank-to-corporate systems market, including a recent contract win with a major UK bank to jointly sell software to the bank's corporate customers.