IBM Launches New Financial Markets Platform

IBM has announced the launch of WebSphere Front Office for Financial Markets, a comprehensive platform enabling financial markets firms to enhance financial market data management across the enterprise to speed trades and minimize latency. The new platform delivers “sub-millisecond” latency and high throughput, and provides safeguards against data loss, according to IBM, by storing large amounts of time-series data in memory for applications that are sensitive to price variations. In addition, being data-feed agnostic, it can collect aggregated and direct-exchange data from a variety of sources and manage its high-speed distribution to all a firm's machine-based and decision-support applications. The components include customizable feed adapters; an intraday history cache to capture received or generated market data; a framework client API where end-user applications access market data; and a fra mework server to service individual client requests.

Visa: Small-Ticket Purchases top $27 Billion

Visa USA, which offers no-signature credit card transactions under $25 across 17 merchant categories, reports that during the first six months of 2006, the purchase volume on small-ticket items has reached $27.3 billion at convenience stores and chain restaurants, pacing ahead of the 2005 level of $49 billion. Millions of Visa cardholders are increasingly turning to their payment cards for small-ticket purchases Visa estimates indicate that by the end of 2006 as much as 27 percent of all Visa transactions may qualify for Visa's No Signature Required Program. 7-Eleven, Inc., Clearview Cinemas, Dairy Queen, Domino's Pizza, and Sonic Drive-In are among the merchants now enabling their customers to small-ticket payments by participating in Visa's program. According to an April 2006 Visa survey, 45 percent of consumers stated that they use their payment cards for small ticket purchases more f requently than they did three years ago.  The respondents cited convenience (73 percent), efficiency (44 percent) and speed (39 percent) as key factors behind their payment choices.

Banks Tap Carreker for Float Management Outsourcing

Carreker Corp. a provider of payments technology and consulting solutions for the financial services industry, announced that it has begun rightsourcing certain float management functions for several U.S. financial institutions. Float management targets cost reductions for institutions adopting electronic clearing while maintaining paper-related infrastructure costs during an expected three-to-five year transition period. Check 21, new image technologies and rising interest rats of created a “dynamic” float management environment, according to Carreker. Carreker's float rightsourcing service allows clients to outsource selected aspects of their float management function. They partner with Carreker to provide current volume and cost information about their transactions, and Carreker's float experts analyze the information to determine optimal electronic and paper check collection patterns. They ca n identify opportunities to reduce transportation networks, equipment, people and to quantify the impacts of alternative processing scenarios. They have the technology to easily maintain the banks' sort patterns, cash letter system, and float pricing system tables, and the expertise to augment the banks' float management resources.

Sun to Acquire Neogent

Sun Microsystems plans to acquire identity management services automation firm Neogent, in a definitive agreement announced by both firms. The combination of Sun's identity management solutions with Neogent's deployment automation toolset is aimed at Sun enterprise customers for improved identity management implementation times while reducing costs, as well as better address compliance requirements for regulatory, security and privacy issues. The acquisition of Neogent will allow Sun to extend its identity management platform and improve its ability to offer customers fixed-price and packaged identity management offerings that are repeatable and predictable with significantly reduced deployment time. In addition, Sun partners will be able to leverage Neogent deployment technologies and service expertise. This announcement comes on the heels of the release of Sun Java System Identity Manager 7.0, and an ag reement with Accenture to jointly develop Identity-enabled Service-Oriented Architecture and composite applications as well as create the Accenture Innovation Center for Sun Solutions, which was announced on Sept. 13.

BB&T, Fidelity Sign Card Processing Agreement

Fidelity National Information Services announced that Columbus, GA- based BB&T Bankcard Corp. has signed a multiyear consumer and commercial credit card processing agreement with FIS' Card Services division. Under the terms of the five-year agreement, FIS will process all transactions for consumer and commercial credit cards issued by BB&T Bankcard, which is looking to introduce new products to market faster and realize savings from processing improvement. BB&T Bankcard is a wholly owned subsidiary of BB&T Corp. of Winston-Salem, NC. Large-volume credit card processing is a facet of FIS' comprehensive and scalable suite of solutions for financial institutions, including core processing, channel solutions, integration, outsourcing and payment solutions.

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