JP Morgan Chase taps Juice in New York

The firm’s credit derivatives trading desk and client valuations area went live with the software last month, and the credit research group is due to roll it out shortly. They follow the high-grade corporate bond trading area, which went live in June. More than 70 people are using the software: about 60 in the two trading areas (a few of whom are in London) and another six each in client valuations and credit research.

The software consolidates data from multiple sources and feeds it into Microsoft applications such as Word and Excel. The data is updated in real time as an element changes. At the bank, the software pulls data from internal applications and Bloomberg for high-grade corporate bond trading; from internal sources for credit derivatives trading; from internal and external sources, primarily Bloomberg, Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, for credit research; and from internal sources, Bloomberg and external ratings information for client valuations, according to a JP Morgan Chase official close to the project.

The software automates a number of manual processes at the firm, allowing each trader to save one hour of work a day, says Paul Carey, vice-president of financial services at Juice. For example, the credit derivatives area is using it to manage risk in real time. "Juice lets them integrate all the sources into one dashboard application and drill down," Carey says.

The client valuations group uses the software for mark to market, ratings and portfolio management for its institutional customers. The Juice software has sped up the production of reports and analysis and provides better access to quantitative information for making decisions and recommendations, Juice officials say.

The credit research group, meanwhile, will use it to create and automate models and for ad hoc data sourcing, says the JP Morgan Chase official."It enables us to do things we could never do before and offered a nice return in terms of time and money - it gave us the ability to meet our needs for mixing data from internal sources and market data," the official says. "Juice has the potential to expand further in the current organisations and beyond," adding that it is quickly spreading within the firm.

Juice helped deploy the solution and supports JP Morgan Chase’s help desk, which provides front-line support.Juice says it has two strengths: unlike products that are specific to the content provider, Juice can aggregate data from different systems. In addition, it can expose internal databases to Excel, says Jared Smith, vice-president of marketing.

Juice can interface with any information source and offers out-of-the-box adaptors for popular databases (eg, ODBC), Bloomberg, Web Scraping, CSV files and XML/Web Services. The company provides custom adaptors for Multex, Reuters, First Call and Worldscope, and an SDK for developing adaptors for non-standard systems and data feeds.

The server is Java-based. Customers are running it in production on HP-UX, Solaris, Windows NT/2000 and Lynx. The client runs on Windows 98 to Windows XP and supports Office Versions 97, 2000 and XP.