Press Releases

Barclays Global Investors Selects Asset Control for Global Reference Data and Time Series Data Management

Global Investment Firm Selects Asset Control for Global Centralized Data Management

New York and London, December 12, 2005

Asset Control, a leading provider of centralized data management solutions to the financial industry, today announced that San Francisco-based Barclays Global Investors (BGI), among the world’s largest institutional investment firms, has selected Asset Control’s flagship product, AC Plus, as their central data repository for reference data and time series data management worldwide. A global implementation will commence in January 2006.

"Asset Control's AC Plus solution was selected for its ability to provide BGI with high quality and consistent data management, strategic for our operations" said Iain Greer, Global IT Product Head of BGI.  "In addition, particularly key to our selection was the solution’s flexible architecture and the ease in which Asset Control could handle large volumes of data concurrently to accommodate our strict performance benchmarks."

AC Plus was selected following an extensive performance evaluation and will be configured to BGI's business requirements, managing data from a large number of external and internal data sources to include equity, fixed income and research data.  AC Plus will consolidate the management of time series data and reference data, resulting in high-quality information to be distributed to many diverse applications such as BGI's trading systems, portfolio management systems and research systems.

"In planning to centralize data management globally, the most important factor for any buyer is the need for confidence in the core technology and the solution's ability to provide quality data management. We are pleased to have proven our world-class solution to BGI and are delighted to have been selected by such a prestigious firm." said Ger Rosenkamp, CEO of Asset Control.

About Barclays Global Investors
Barclays Global Investors (BGI) is one of the world’s largest asset managers providing structured investment strategies such as risk-controlled active strategies and indexing. BGI manages 65% of the world’s 100 largest pension plans and is the global leader in assets and products in exchange-traded funds (ETFs) through its iShares® brand with more than 130 ETFs. The firm managed over $1.4 trillion in assets as of June 30, 2005, for more than 2,700 clients in 48 countries around the world. BGI is an innovator in investment management, applying science and technology to the investment process. BGI is owned by Barclays PLC, one of the world’s leading global financial services providers.   For additional information about Barclays Global Investors, please visit the firm's website at http://www.barclaysglobal.com.

About Asset Control
Asset Control offers centralized data management to financial industry firms through a full range of in-house and outsourced options.  A choice of developer tools, turnkey software solutions and outsourced services enable users to optimize their investment data for efficiency, cost control, reduced operational risk and increased value from their data. 

Derived from the robust and reliable AC Plus modular framework, the Asset Control product set includes data solutions addressing market risk, counterparty credit risk, security master, research and corporate actions, as well as global data networking and administration. Handling data from vendors and in-house systems, these solutions collect, validate, normalize, and consolidate data into cleansed composite "golden copy" sets for business use.

Customers include Abbey National, ABN AMRO, Barclays Capital, Bayerische Landesbank , BBVA, Commerzbank, IBM (Dresdner Bank), Grupo Santander, Harvard Management Company, HSH Nordbank, HypoVereinsbank, ING, LCH.Clearnet, Robeco Groep, Société Générale, Standard Bank, Standard Chartered and Union Investment, as well as a super-major global energy group. Established in 1991, Asset Control is a privately held firm with operations in London, New York and the Netherlands.  For more information please visit www.asset-control.com.