BERKSHIRE, U.K., Oct. 31, 2002 (PRIMEZONE) -- Microgen-OST (LSE:MCGN) (www.microgenost.com), a leading developer of business rules software for the financial services sector and a division of Microgen plc, announces the implementation of its software at Wells Fargo Institutional Brokerage & Sales (WFIBS) in Minneapolis.
The Microgen-OST solution provides an enhanced middle office infrastructure that delivers an automated real time trade and settlement bridge between web trading portals and both front office inventory management systems and back office settlement systems at WFIBS. The solution has been designed to introduce a reusable rapid development toolkit and reduce WFIBS's reliance on third party vendors for support.
"Our objective was to build a rules-based solution to improve our straight through processing capabilities with particular emphasis on error handling and visibility of transactions throughout the trade lifecycle," commented Karen Denney, WFIBS Project Manager. "The Microgen-OST software has allowed us to achieve these goals."
WFIBS chose the Microgen-OST solution for its flexibility and its innovative and intuitive interface, which empowers the business to respond rapidly to product-, client- or market-driven change.
"This has been a great project for Microgen-OST," commented Clive Andrews, EVP North America, Microgen-OST. "This success is an endorsement of our product capabilities and our overall strength as a solution provider for the financial services sector."
The system integrates third party vendor applications such as Bloomberg, BondDesk and SunGard Phase3 with WFIBS's internal systems, providing total visibility of trade status from order through settlement, while also actively advising WFBS operations staff of any third party systems connectivity issues by monitoring "heartbeat" messages. The initial phase of the project-the automation of institutional executions-went live in February 2002, providing significant business benefit and ROI within a four-month timeframe. Retail executions were added in April 2002 and the project is on schedule to deliver settlement and security master processing in November.
About Microgen-OST
Microgen-OST provides highly functional business and accounting rules software specifically designed for the financial services sector. The Microgen-OST approach focuses on business processes; it provides business user control in the integration of the many disparate front, middle and back office systems and facilitates the provision of daily financial and management information. Since its launch in July 1998 the company has secured a premier list of clients including: ABN AMRO, Royal Bank of Scotland Financial Markets (RBS FM), UBS, ING, Nomura and Deutsche Bank. Business and technology partners include IBM, Atos KPMG Consulting, SAP, Oracle, Sybase, and Sun Microsystems. Based in the City of London, Microgen-OST also has offices in New York and Poland. Formed in 1998, the company was acquired by Microgen plc in February 2002. For more information visit www.microgenost.com.
About Microgen plc
Microgen plc (LSE:MCGN) provides software, consultancy and managed services enabling businesses to collate, process and distribute data to enhance their business processes and information output. The Group comprises three operating divisions.
1. Microgen-Telesmart uses these techniques in delivering value-added
transactional services including billing, payment and hosted
database applications to provide a range of managed services for
e-business process integration.
2. Microgen-Kaisha provides vendor independent consultancy in data
warehousing and application integration to transform customer data
into information.
3. Microgen-OST provides enterprise integration solutions, software
and consultancy to major financial institutions, enabling the
application of user-defined business rules, to integrate front,
middle and back office systems.
www.microgen.co.uk
About Wells Fargo Institutional Brokerage & Sales
Wells Fargo Institutional Brokerage & Sales includes Wells Fargo Brokerage Services, LLC, and Wells Fargo Institutional Securities, LLC, and serves the institutional investment needs of more than 15,000 customers across the United States, trading approximately $12 billion in fixed-income and other securities daily. Nearly 100 registered sales representatives, located in 21 offices in 13 states, provide investment solutions for corporations, banks, money managers, insurance companies and public entities that manage all or part of their own investment portfolios. Institutional Brokerage & Sales also underwrites corporate and public debt.
About Wells Fargo
Wells Fargo & Company is a diversified financial services company with $312 billion in assets, providing banking, insurance, investments, mortgage and consumer finance from more than 5,400 stores and the Internet (www.wellsfargo.com) across North America and elsewhere internationally. Wells Fargo provides capital and financial services to more than 1.5 million businesses with annual sales up to $10 million in the 50 United States, Puerto Rico and Canada. As a leading financial services provider to the small-business market, Wells Fargo is the largest small business lender in the nation of loans up to $100,000. Through its targeted loan programs, Wells Fargo has lent more than $13 billion to African-American, Asian American, Latino and Women owned businesses since 1995.