Premier Systems (London) Plc, based in Islington, was founded in 1987 by four ex-employees in the information technology sector of City finance companies. They realised that a market existed for reliable financial systems and their objective was to build a systems house for the financial community to supply consultancy, custom-built systems, and offer research and development and maintenance and support. The company started in consultancy, one of its present clients being one of the Big Four retail banks with whcih it is working on one of the largest European projects using Oracle release 6 database and fourth generation language. The research and development was finances by the revenues from the consultancy side of the business. Premier used the availability of good Oracle programmers on the market to develop its Venus product portfolio, a stock management and lending system, though a small ammount of programming was carried out in C. Presently available on the market is a stock management system for custodial operators such as banks and insurance houses that trade actively on the market; previously this was done manually.
Venus
Also available is a system for licensed money brokers on the UK market, and a version for international lending is planned to be available by the end of the second quarter. Venus is portable across the DEC VAX/VMS range and the Hewlett-Packard HP-UX Unix range, and after small alterations at the operating system level it can run on other environments that run Oracle. For technical reasons it will not run on IBM systems but Martin Dorsett, one of the founding managing directors, says that customers don’t mind buying a piece of hardware just to run Venus. It client base includes City of London financial institutions and ranges from international banks to fund management companies. Venus will be compatible with Taurus, the automated stock transfer and registration system that will eventually be installed at London’s International Stock Exchange; Premier expects this to occur within the next 12 to 18 months. The focus for future developments will continue to be finance-oriented, with financial control portfolios for unit trusts, mortgages and personal equity plans and other financial products. Though there is much technology in the front-end dealing side of the market, Premier sees many gaps that could be exploited. The company signed an agreement last week for a joint marketing venture with the Brussels-based Belgium company, Computer Aided Finance Corporation, for a decision support and portfolio management system for fund managers which can interface to Reuters and Excel and runs under Unix System V and VAX/VMS operating systems. There are already over 20 installations on the continent, and one already in the UK. The systems company is also in the process of acquiring a licence from a UK company for a treasury management system for companies. This has 20 installations in the UK. In the future the company will continue to develop its own product base, hoping to launch its own portfolio management system within the next six months and add a report writer, which is currently being tested in-house, to its range. It aims to maintain a balance between its consultancy, custom development, and research. Since its formation the company has kept a low profile, concentrating on providing a quality and reliable service, enabling it to show prospects its systems working on site, and now the directors feel that Premier has established itself well enough to publicise its existance. It has 50 employees at present and hopes to increase the number in the coming year; half of these are in the consultancy division. The company is profitable on a UKP1.2m turnover for the 1989 fiscal year to June 1. Dorsett forecasts that this will increase to UKP3m this year.
