Financial management consultancy Tatford Malet Ltd, London, has entered the software market with the launch of a foreign exchange package to run on Stratus Computer Inc fault tolerant hardware. Called Facts, for Fully Automated Comprehensive Trading System, the system is tailored to the needs of foreign exchange dealers and at UKP15,000 per workstation, comes at about half the price of existing offerings, claims Tatford. The system was built by the team that installed Citibank’s foreign exchange system in New York and is aimed at smaller organisations with six traders upwards. Jo Currie, director of Tatford Mallett said that the majority of systems currently in use are either designed for equities with forex software cobbled on, or are costly bespoke systems. A foriegn exchange dealer’s workload is radically different from his equities colleague’s with a dealer expected to show daily profit. Speculative activity therefore accounts for 90% of daily activity and up to 250 transactions per day of around $200m each are not unusual. Facts will be marketed in the UK by the Dynamic Decisions division and as the worldwide foreign exchange centre London will be the focus of marketing efforts where Currie hopes to generate 25% of the product revenues. But Facts will be offered in the rest of Europe and Currie anticipates increased demand after 1992 when cities such as Madrid and Lisbon become foreign exchange centres.
