The buzzword for global banks in e-finance over the past 12 months has been integration. Firms that have a wide range of sites have focused their efforts on making sure that clients need only one password to enter all of them. More important, they have made sure the databases behind those sites send information to each other much more efficiently, so that several different sites share appropriate information. As far as possible, manual intervention is excluded from post-trade processing. Meanwhile, some smaller firms have learnt from bigger banks’ past mistakes and built new, well-designed websites with interesting and unusual features.
In the past, most of these awards have been easy to decide. From a selection of, say, five websites, there was usually one that was clearly more advanced than the others. In 2002, however, the differences between the two or even three best sites in most categories were tiny. It means that even the most demanding clients can find the online functionality they want. Banks are fully aware that if they don’t offer that service, another bank will.
What follows is a broad outline of the sites and strategy of the leading banks in this field.
Brown Brothers Harriman
After two years of holding the best site for custody title, Brown Brothers Harriman was narrowly beaten this year. Its custody site is still one of the best there is, however. On the forex side, it has a basic research website, which is essentially a collection of research reports. But its forex trading site for fund managers is very strong, with innovative ways to manage daily risk exposures.
BNP Paribas
This was the first year that BNP Paribas has entered a range of websites in these awards, and they are all very well designed. The firm’s natural European focus differentiates them from the competition. In bonds, the high-grade analytics are of a high quality, and, for example, enable clients to plot bonds against credit default swaps. The portal also offers an innovative site for CDOs. In forex, the cash execution website is very simple. However, as it is relatively new it is bound to develop. The forex research site is comprehensive, detailed and well laid out.
Barclays Capital
As ever, Barclays Capital demonstrated an understated but impressive range of sites. Across the board the firm has continued its good progress from last year. It is the runner-up in forex cash execution as it has one of the few systems to offer dealable streaming prices. In fixed income, its research site is well laid out, and its index site is very good. It has a scenario builder which allows clients can see how rate changes would affect their portfolio. The site also has a good offering for inflation-linked bonds, a speciality of the firm. Bondscape, the retail bond trading site that it contributes to along with HSBC and Winterflood Securities, won the award for best site for retail bond trading.
Bank of New York
Bank of New York’s online strength is in forex. Its forex trading for fund managers site has won it awards this year and last. For research, it maintains a strong focus on flow data. In post-trade services, it offers its clients a link to CLS for forex processing. The bank also demonstrated an excellent site for letters of credit as its trade finance offering.
Bear Stearns
Bear Stearns’ new equities research site is well designed and its prime brokerage site is good at basic reporting and performance analysis, though lacking more cutting-edge functionality. Its fixed-income research site is a basic, effective document repository.
Citigroup
Citigroup wins the award for best bank in online forex for the second year running, with an excellent and comprehensive suite of sites, but it won by a narrower margin this year. Its cash management site is excellent, and its custody site offers extremely thorough reporting options. Its equities research portal is good but does nothing especially innovative. And, strangely, that is all that the firm demonstrated in equities. It showed nothing at all in fixed income, even though some of its tools are highly regarded by rival firms. And it demonstrated nothing for derivatives or loans.
CSFB
CSFB continues to build on its highly impressive Locus platform, an analytics and market data platform updated in real time. That platform, which is fully customizable, now covers forex as well as fixed income. Its new quant tool in fixed income, Cusp, is excellent. PrimeTrade remains the strongest single-bank offering in fixed-income trading. However, it is slightly behind the competition for forex trading. In its defence, the bank says its clients do not ask for more advanced trading functionality. In equities, it has competitive convertibles and prime brokerage sites. Its equities research site is a straightforward document depository. The forex offering is comprehensive and strong across the board.
Deutsche Bank
Deutsche Bank is one of the firms that covers all the main areas of the business. This springs from a pragmatic approach to web development. As Ian Rosen, head of e-commerce for global markets, says: “The fundamental question is: how does this platform get the client out of the office earlier, or get them paid more to leave the office at the same time?”
In fixed income, Deutsche’s new-issue system is good, indices are also good, and it has powerful portfolio analytics. The bank also has a powerful switch spotter called TradeFinder, but releases it to only a small selection of clients. Its equity derivatives site is comprehensive and its convertibles site has won its award every year. In forex, it shows good use of web technology on its research site, and it is the first to implement click-and-deal trading on live streaming prices, moving away from the traditional request-for-quote model.
Goldman Sachs
Goldman Sachs offers excellent equities sites in the limited fields it focuses on. Both its equities research and prime brokerage sites were close seconds. It recently revamped its research offering in fixed income, making it an impressive platform that links market data and trading to research. The research itself is well segmented and organized. Its focus this year in forex seems to be on refining what it already has, rather than pushing its products to a new level. Its options site focuses on price discovery instead of execution. It has a strong site for forex prime brokerage.
JPMorgan
This has always been one of the strongest banks in e-finance and it still is, especially since it brought together its web products under MorganMarkets. In derivatives, the range and depth of its sites is unmatched. It offers good data and tools, particularly DataQuery, which is a key feature of many different areas of its portal. Its online forex services have been improved, including a much more comprehensive research offering. Forex trading is also better coordinated. In fixed income it has good market monitor pages and good research but a slightly unattractively designed trading system. JPMorgan’s equities sites cover a narrow range of products and are of a high if not outstanding standard. It does, however, offer an excellent ADRs site and a powerful quantitative strategy site.
Lehman Brothers
Lehman Brothers provided the biggest surprise in the 2002 awards. Having never won any before, it scooped a large number in fixed income and offers a range of analytics and derivatives tools that rival the best on the market. In fixed income, it combines pricing data with research especially well, and it prides itself on its data. The bank has a solid set of sites across the board in equities. The equities research site is slightly different from its competitors’ and its convertibles and prime brokerage sites are of a competitive standard. It builds single-dealer sites only for those products that cannot be traded in a multibank environment, preferring to give clients the ability to view several prices at once whenever it can. Its site design can be rather basic, which some may see as an advantage.
Merrill Lynch
This year’s most improved bank in online fixed income has developed some interesting and innovative tools in that area. Perhaps the next area for improvement should be equities. Considering its size as an equities house, its sites are surprisingly disappointing. They cover a limited range of products and lag behind the competition. In forex, it is preparing a new web offering.
Morgan Stanley
Morgan Stanley has been judged the best bank in online equities for three consecutive years. It offers some of the best sites available across several equities products and some, such as its trading and analytics sites, are clear industry leaders. It is trying to leapfrog some of the competition with the cross-product TradeXL Web. This now offers forex trading and can show cross-product market quotes in one panel – for forex, equities and futures. The platform also offers cross-product order entry and monitoring, position monitoring and request-for-quote trading all in one system. In fixed income, its sites are solid but not extraordinary. Its CDO site is very good, and very specialized for its clients.
UBS Warburg
This year’s inaugural winner of the best bank on the internet title has the best range of highest-quality sites across the board, all backed up with excellent databases. Its online forex offering is particularly strong, and the firm narrowly missed the award for best bank in online forex. Similarly, it was very close behind Morgan Stanley for the best bank in online equities, and Lehman Brothers in fixed income. The fact that it can come so close to each of these key awards reflects the excellent overall standard of its sites. Its single sign-on portal is well designed throughout. The firm has an aggressive technology strategy that is helping to develop its business.
Full write-ups of awards for best internet sites across debt, equities, foreign exchange, derivatives, commodities and trade finance and investor and corporate services can be found at www.euromoney.com
