Front teams with NIWS to offer Arena in Japan

Front Capital Systems, an operating unit of SunGard, has begun marketing a localised version of Front Arena's treasury trading and back-office solution to regional banks in Japan through a distribution agreement with NIWS, a Tokyo-based business server systems provider.

NIWS is a joint venture between IBM Japan (IBM) and Nomura Research Institute (NRI). NIWS can resell IBM hardware, but the ultimate platform depends upon the users' needs, officials said. The hardware from NIWS does not come bundled with the Arena software.

Under a sub-licensing agreement, NIWS will market the system as the NIWS STP (straight through processing) trading solution, which delivers processing from trade capture to settlements and regulatory reporting. NIWS developed the local requirements and will manage distribution as well as provide local customer support. NIWS STP trading solution provides trade capture for foreign exchange, money markets, fixed income (including Japanese government bonds), and derivatives. The user interfaces are in Japanese.

Running on a version of Microsoft Windows for the Japanese market, all Arena transaction entry windows and position pages are in Japanese, and the program has the capability to store Japanese double byte character set (DBCS) data - usually Japanese or Kanji — in the database. Users can store data via the Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle relational database management system offerings. Currently, the reporting module is via Oracle but it can be supported by SQL Server.

Yukio Sakamoto, managing director at NISW in Tokyo, said one of the reasons for launching the product is to accommodate regional banks that do not aggressively trade in the market.

Sakamoto added that there is a need for a reporting function by the banks to produce risk management reports for both internal purposes and for the Bank of Japan and the Ministry of Finance. Sakamoto said the reporting module was developed by an undisclosed business partner and interfaced to Arena.