BBH upgrades web platform for investors

US custodian Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH) went live with the upgrade of its web-based currency trading service FX WorldView last week, Brenda Kerins, head of FX e-commerce at BBH in New York told RiskNews' sister publication FX Week .

"We’re trying to tailor the products to the global investor as much as possible because that’s our core client base and our niche," Kerins said. "We analyse any way that we can make the process more efficient and reduce risk as well as lessening their heavy administrative workload."

The latest additions to FX WorldView include aggregation, two-way pricing and real-time streaming rates from BBH. These allow for improved straight-through processing (STP) and integration, including post-trade allocations and backward and forward integration.

"Money managers typically have about 10-20 accounts - the aggregation facility means they don’t have to do individual trades for each fund," Kerins said, adding that before BBH added live rates, users had to make request-for-quotes. "We now have a page [of live rates] that clients can keep up all day and customise."

FX WorldView is part of BBH’s WordView range of internet products, which was launched in 2000. It enables clients to trade directly with BBH on a 24-hour basis and access 20 currencies in the spot market, as well as trading forward and swaps contracts. It is designed to reduce the time it takes to execute, allocate and confirm a trade, enabling fund managers to enter bulk trades and import fund allocation breakdowns from portfolio management spreadsheets in a one step. STP enables simultaneous confirmation of all fund accounts.

Last year BBH added allocations features, said Kerins, but this is the first major enhancement since the system’s launch. She added that 60% of BBH’s client base now use one or more of the bank’s internet-based products (WorldView, FX IndexLink and FX OrderView).

The WorldView suite is developed and maintained by Dublin-based FX and money market software vendor Cognotec, which works alongside BBH’s in-house team. FX IndexLink and FX OrderView, an electronic limit order management system, are proprietary systems.