Standard Bank has signed a 10-year contract with Thomson Beta Systems for the vendor's back office clearing and settlement platform, Capital.
Thomson says its Capital product, which is a specialist institutional back-office system, delivers cost effective straight-through processing from deal capture through to clearers, providing coverage for a wide range of financial products and support for a wide variety of system interfaces and settlement links.
Standard Bank, the London based subsidiary of Standard Bank of South Africa, has already rolled out the Capital system to manage securities settlement at its London and New York offices. The bank says it plans to deploy the system at its Moscow and Hong Kong offices in 2006 from a central hub in London.
Steven Quigley, MD of operations, Standard Bank, says: "We are proactively pursuing opportunities to help increase operational efficiency and risk control in our back-office, and have been impressed with Capital's business centric and advanced approach in this area. Our straight-through processing rates increased dramatically, reducing unit costs and increasing capacity in one swoop."
Separately, fund management firm Henderson Global Investors is rolling out Thomson Financial's Thomson One Investment Management platform across its operations in London, Singapore and Tokyo.
Thomson says its investment management system combines Datastream encyclopedic databases with its interactive portfolio analytics service, in addition to its global real-time market data and news, and extensive estimates, research and fundamental content.
Henderson will deploy the application framework to the key functions of funds management, research analysis and performance measurement. Users in London will be amongst the first European clients to adopt the recently launched One Investment Management system. Users in Asia will initially use Thomson One Analytics and will be upgraded later this year.
Lesley Cairney, director of equity operations, Henderson, says: "As one of the first adopters of Thomson One Investment Management, we have worked closely with Thomson to ensure the solution can be configured to meet our users' needs. This agreement enables us to consolidate and integrate our content requirements at a lower total cost of ownership."