Press Releases

Lloyds TSB Corporate Markets Selects Asset Control to Support its Move into Derivatives-Based Client Solutions

Credit and Market Risk Functions to Benefit from High-Quality Data

London, November 13, 2006

Asset Control, a leading provider of Centralized Data Management (CDM) solutions to the financial industry, today announced that Lloyds TSB Corporate Markets has selected its flagship product AC Plus. Implemented as part of a phased project, Asset Control’s modular software will help the bank – the fifth largest in the UK – with its plans to expand its product offering to clients. AC Plus will be used to support the expanded daily trading activity, manage risk and meet regulatory requirements within the Financial Markets division of Lloyds TSB Corporate Markets.
 
“We have moved well beyond the vanilla products to create more bespoke – and naturally more complex – solutions for our customers in the areas of foreign exchange, interest rate and credit trading and are rapidly expanding our debt capital markets capacity,” explains David Wright, deputy head of Financial Markets Middle Office. “Asset Control provides the cleansed and consolidated pricing data that we need to support a wider range of products. It gives us scalability, so that as the business creates more complex products, it is relatively easy for us to provide traders and risk managers with the data that they need. It also enables us to make the risk management process more efficient.”

The relationship banking and trading expertise of Lloyds TSB Corporate Markets have recently been brought together in new premises at 10 Gresham Street, in the City of London. With the IT department’s attention focused on the move and the implementation of the overall infrastructure, Wright’s team sought an easy-to-implement, turnkey data management solution. Asset Control won the contract largely for its ability to consolidate internal and external price feeds; its security; and its support for a direct Reuters data feed for pricing and “shredding” – the ability to capture information in digital form, then reconstruct pages of data.  Phase one was implemented in just six weeks and the system is anticipated to be live before the end of the year.
   
“Asset Control has proved an extremely easy partner to work with,” says Wright. “They were able to provide an off-the-shelf solution, along with the necessary consultancy – they responded instantly with everything we needed.” 
  
“Having ready access to high-quality data is fundamental to the business expansion Lloyds TSB Corporate Markets is planning,” says Ger Rosenkamp, CEO of Asset Control. “We are pleased we could deliver the scalability they were looking for and implement the solution within a short time frame.” 

The Asset Control solution replaces custom-built, spreadsheet-based applications run by the Middle Office team. Initially, it is being used to handle the end-of-day pricing process, delivering prices to the trading engine and supplying data to the market and credit risk functions. AC Plus manages interest rate curves, foreign exchange spot and forward points, and interest rate/foreign exchange option volatilities; it supports real-time and static data from leading data vendors and niche firms. In later stages of the project, the Asset Control technology may be used to consolidate and manage the wide range of reference data necessary to support the bank’s debt capital markets expansion. Lloyds TSB expects to complete the project next year.

About Lloyds TSB Corporate Markets
Lloyds TSB Corporate Markets is a division of the Lloyds TSB group and provides dedicated financial services to all businesses, ranging from start-ups and small commercial firms to global corporates and financial institutions. The bank takes a unique and award-winning relationship-based approach to banking, focusing on providing their customers with a financial solution tailored to their individual needs. Lloyds TSB Corporate Markets offers a wide range of solutions including loan syndication, comprehensive risk management structures, credit trading, debt and equity finance, international business services and structured investments. A range of e-banking and e-trading services is also available through the Corporate Markets portal.  For more information, please visit www.lloydstsb.com/corporatemarkets.

About Asset Control
Asset Control is the world’s leading provider of Centralized Data Management (CDM) to financial industry firms.  With a complete range of in-house and outsourced options, Asset Control delivers Total Data Management (TDM), a hybrid approach to data management.  The selection 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, Allied Irish Banks PLC, Barclays Capital, Barclays Global Investors, Bayerische Landesbank, BBVA, Calyon, Commerzbank, Convexity Capital Management, E*TRADE Securities, LLC, IBM (Dresdner Bank), Grupo Santander, Harvard Management Company, HSH Nordbank, HypoVereinsbank, ING, Lloyds TSB Corporate Markets, LCH.Clearnet, Robeco Groep, Société Générale, Standard Bank, Standard Chartered, Union Investment and Wachovia Corporation 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.