Press Releases

Standard Chartered Selects AC PriceMaster for Price Data Consolidation and Market Risk Factors

New York, NY, September 27, 2004

Asset Control Solution Chosen from Field of Vendors To Support International Market Risk Management Operations

Asset Control, a leading provider of investment data management solutions to the financial industry, today announced that Standard Chartered, one of the world’s most international banks, has selected AC PriceMaster to manage multi-sourced data and generate risk factors for markets in the US, EU, Asia, the Middle East and Africa. The first phase of the implementation is projected for completion at the end of the year.

“As a leader in Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Standard Chartered is in more than 50 markets. Therefore, our data layer must support not only advanced risk control, but also provide global access and manipulability to support timely research and disciplined pricing,” said Rajesh Bhatia – Group Head of Market Risk at Standard Chartered. “Asset Control met our criteria and stood out among the competition for the maturity of its product and the breadth of its functionality.”

The selection of AC PriceMaster followed a rigorous comparative analysis of competing data management solutions. Asset Control was chosen for its ability to standardize traditional and emerging markets data, its adaptability to changing business needs, its scalability to large volumes of data and its strong track record of success in sophisticated risk management operations.

“We are proud to welcome Standard Chartered into the Asset Control customer group, and we look ahead to extending this implementation into Southeast Asia,” said Ger Rosenkamp, CEO of Asset Control.  “As Basel II adds new stringency to risk-related data management, financial institutions are revamping their market data management for increased operational efficiency and transparency. For these firms, AC PriceMaster offers all our established strengths in pricing data management, with the added benefit of off-the-shelf speed of implementation.”

AC PriceMaster is the new quick-start version of the Asset Control market data management solution that is currently used by virtually every Asset Control customer.  AC PriceMaster automates the entire market data lifecycle including gathering and verifying, consolidating and cleansing real-time and historical prices, creating and maintaining risk factors and curves, and making data available to users and applications.

Because AC PriceMaster is a specialized configuration of the AC Plus modular framework, expanding to new data categories – such as reference data, counterparty data or corporate actions -- is a seamless process. The scalability of the system in Unix or Linux versions supports enterprise implementations as well as departmental use.  To learn more about AC PriceMaster or to visit customer sites, please contact info@asset-control.com.

About Standard Chartered
Standard Chartered employs 30,000 people in over 500 locations in more than 50 countries in the Asia Pacific Region, South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, the United Kingdom and the Americas. It is one of the world's most international banks, with a management team comprising 70 nationalities.

Standard Chartered is listed on both the London Stock Exchange and the
Stock Exchange of Hong Kong and is in the top 25 FTSE-100 companies, by market capitalization.

It serves both Consumer and Wholesale Banking customers. Consumer Banking provides credit cards, personal loans, mortgages, deposit taking and wealth management services to individuals and small to medium sized enterprises.
Wholesale Banking provides corporate and institutional clients with services in trade finance, cash management, lending, securities services, foreign exchange, debt capital markets and corporate finance.

About Asset Control
Asset Control provides the financial industry with software and outsourced solutions for improved efficiency and cost control of investment data management, as well as adding more business value to the data.  Quick-to-implement solutions, based on the robust and reliable AC Plus modular framework, range from technical solutions such as AC SmartFeed, and AC Business Suite solutions for risk and research, to infrastructure solutions for STP, global data networking and enterprise data control.

Data coverage includes reference (security master), corporate actions, issuer, counterparty and settlement, historic and real-time market data. Managing data from vendors and in-house systems, Asset Control’s broad functionality includes collection, validation, normalization, and consolidation into a cleansed composite “golden copy” set aligned to industry standards.

Customers include LCH.Clearnet, Abbey National, ABN AMRO, Barclays Capital, Bayerische Landesbank , BBVA, Commerzbank, IBM (Dresdner Bank), Harvard Management Company, HSH Nordbank, HypoVereinsbank, Grupo Santander, ING, Robeco Groep, Société Générale, 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.