Peregrine Systems (Peresys), the software development arm of listed financial services company, Peregrine Holdings, has signed a two year software contract worth R2 million with PSG Investment Services for the supply of MAIA, its locally developed portfolio management system.
Peregrine Holdings recently defied a subdued financial services market sector when it announced that its after tax profits for the year ended March 31 2001 grew by 28% to R109,6 million.
MAIA, a solution for private client portfolio managers who use the JSE`s Broker Dealer Accounting (BDA) mainframe system as their primary system of record, is to be installed at PSG Investment Services offices nationwide. MAIA provides a host of benefits, including on-line customer data, customised reporting, data mining and access control.
"The MAIA system empowers our client advisors and gives them access to important management information at the press of a button. Over time this will dramatically improve our level of service to our clients and reduce costs at the same time," said Emil Linde, a director at PSG Online Securities. "This application will also assist us in the process to customise our data in such a way that we are able to communicate with our clients in the medium of their choice."
Ashley Mendelowitz, a director of Peresys, said the company`s range of locally developed software is starting to make "real inroads into the financial services marketplace, including the asset management market sector".
"Most of the income generated by our software solutions is on an annuity basis. This is how the deal with PSG was struck. PSG has bought the rights to use MAIA for an initial two-year period and are paying us a monthly fee to do so. The contract will naturally be up for review at the end of that period."
Commenting on MAIA, one of the company`s core off-the-shelf software solutions, Mendelowitz said it has been devised to interface with the JSE`s BDA mainframe. "JSE members needed to extract meaningful information from the BDA system - so we developed an application that boasts a reliable and accurate database and has the ability to provide functionality at the front end so that this information can be presented in a readily understandable and flexible Windows-based Interface."
He said that thanks to MAIA`s ability to interface with BDA, clients - such as PSG - are now able to e-mail their clients their portfolios, provide access to data over the web, and improve the management of portfolio`s through Maia`s ability to implement investment decisions almost instantaneously over a large number of clients. The product enables a host of other services, including data mining. "This is a valuable tool for stockbrokers and we are expecting MAIA to become widely deployed in this country," he said.
Peresys has developed a slew of off-the shelf software, including Hermes, an equity trading and order management system, Finance Engine, a web based solution that handles the administration of Investors in Unitised funds, as well as Connex, a middleware application that facilitates system integration, automation, and messaging.
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