Bank of New York Is Growing, Barclays to Use AC Plus for Data, and more

Bank of New York Expands Global Transition Management Business

The Bank of New York has expanded its Global Transition Management team to support the growth of its business worldwide and increased client base it gained from the recent acquisition of Lynch, Jones & Ryan. (LJR).

BNY appointed Ken Temple as senior vice president, and Richard Dixon, vice president. Both will serve as product specialists working from New York.

“The expanded capabilities of BNY Global Transition Management are a perfect fit for LJR’s clients. In addition to a comprehensive offering that focuses on risk management and cost minimization, our clients will benefit from the broad expertise of BNY Global Transition Management and its ability to offer those capabilities through a single point of contact,” said Todd Burns, president of LJR, in a release.

BNY Global Transition Management, a unit of Bank of New York subsidiary BNY Brokerage, handles transitions involving global equities, global fixed income securities and foreign exchange.

BNY Brokerage is an institutional agency brokerage firm providing solutions to institutional asset owners, asset managers and broker-dealers worldwide. It offers specialized global transition management capabilities, commission management services, research and wholesale services.

Barclays Global Investors to Manage Data With AC Plus

Barclays Global Investors (BGI) has selected AC Plus, Asset Control’s flagship product, as its central data repository for reference data and time series data management worldwide. The investment management firm will begin a global implementation of the solution next month.

The AC Plus solution will be configured to the business requirements of BGI, managing data from a large number of external and internal data sources to include equity, fixed income and research data. The product will consolidate the management of time series data and reference data, resulting in high-quality information to be distributed over several of BGI’s applications, including trading systems, portfolio management systems and research systems.

“Asset Control’s AC Plus solution was selected for its ability to provide BGI with high quality and consistent data management, strategic for our operations,” said Iain Greer, global IT product head at BGI, in a release. “In addition, particularly key to our selection was the solution’s flexible architecture and the ease in which Asset Control could handle large volumes of data concurrently to accommodate our strict performance benchmarks.”

BGI is an asset manager providing structured investment strategies such as risk-controlled active strategies and indexing. The firm manages $1.4 trillion in assets.

S&P Releases New Version of CapitalIQ

Standard & Poor’s Capital IQ division has announced the release of the latest version of the Capital IQ market information platform. The new release features a broad range of fixed income and event-driven data as well as related analytics and usability enhancements.

Standard & Poor’s acquired Capital IQ in September 2004, and the company is reporting that the new version of the platform completes the first phase of its plan to integrate S&P’s content with the Capital IQ solution.

“Capital IQ is an important part of our growth strategy,” said Vlad Stadnyk, executive managing director of S&P data and information services, in a release. “We are working to continuously enhance the Capital IQ platform with Standard & Poor’s industry-leading content to deliver desktop solutions that streamline the workflow of bankers, advisors, analysts and portfolio managers across the M&A, private capital, equity and fixed income markets.”

The newly added fixed income data includes securities features, covenants, pricing and S&P ratings. The data is integrated with Capital IQ’s screening tools, company profiles and Microsoft Excel plug-in. The market-moving events database has also been expanded in the new version of Capital IQ. Users can now view over 70 event types for hundreds of thousands of public and private firms, enabling more robust event-driven screening ability.

The Capital IQ platform can be implemented as either a standalone application, or its components can be integrated into existing business applications and portals via systems integration and custom data feeds.

What are people saying about mortgages today:

Rates on 30-year mortgages edged down last week to a seven-month low. Mortgage-giant Freddie Mac reported Thursday that 30-year, fixed-rate mortgages fell to 6.3 percent, down slightly from 6.31 percent two weeks ago. It put rates at the lowest level since they were at 6.24 percent the first week of March.

Bank of Hawaii, Central Pacific Bank, Territorial Savings Bank and Wells Fargo Home Mortgages all cut their 30-year mortgage rates to 5.75 percent this week.

Most people think of a mortgage as a means to an end. After all, you buy a house, not a home loan. But a mortgage is much more than the path to homeownership. It is a financial instrument that must be managed, just like any other financial investment.