Lehman takes a proprietary route to STP integration

US investment bank Lehman Brothers will rely on proprietary technology rather than industry standards to achieve straight-through processing (STP), Patrick Maher, Lehman vice-president of operations technology told delegates at Waters Magazine’s 2002 Financial and Risk Management Technology Congress in New York today.

“We faced the normal buy-versus-build dilemma and decided not to go with industry standards that provide no value-add,” Maher told delegates. “If we designed something that provides a Lehman-only benefit, we’ll drop it in. If we need to connect to a gateway or to a customer, we’ll do that with another adapter.”

The Wall Street firm decided to develop its own adapters that would connect individual applications to a basically invisible message bus, in this case Tibco’s Active Enterprise, explained Maher. Tibco is a software division of Reuters.

Currently, Lehman’s operations technology group has integrated several front-office trading systems with three mainframe-based back-office settlement systems in this manner. Maher said the bank is happy with the result.