Cognotec launches Autodeal Plus with buy-side target

Dubbed Autodeal Plus, the system features a range of new functionality – particularly for buy-side clients of banks that implement the system.

Autodeal is Cognotec’s forex pricing and trading system, which its bank clients ‘white label’ and roll out to their buy-side clients. The all-new fund management module, which took 18 months to design, automates the forex legs of cross-border equity trades.

“The fund management community has become more important to the forex industry,” Cognotec chief executive Brian Maccaba told sister magazine Buy Side IT. “Fund managers have become bigger, and have chosen to diversify portfolios globally.”

For example, moving funds between different-denomination stocks involves not just the primary equity trades but also forex trades between the local currencies. The module interfaces to the fund manager’s portfolio system and automatically works out the required forex legs of the equity trades, nets the large number of small forex trades into a small number of aggregated larger trades and executes the trades directly with the bank.

Maccaba said Cognotec has just made its first sales of the new system to three major banks, which he would not name, that have been testing it since February and are now using it internally and piloting it with clients.

Autodeal has been re-engineered using California-based BEA Weblogic to ensure interoperability with different systems. It can now run on Sun Microsystems’ Solaris operating system, other versions of Unix and Microsoft Windows NT, using Oracle database technology.

The system will be available to banks either as an on-site installation or as an application service provider, and allows users to ‘pick and mix’ discrete modules if they don’t require the entire system.

“Enough of the forex business is now electronic that you can’t afford not to [have electronic trading systems],” says Maccaba. But those systems can be enhanced by slotting-in separate modules from Autodeal Plus.