Here's some bad news for those people who don't find STP boring: other people do.
Research by financial services consulting firm TowerGroup has confirmed what many have long suspected - that the STP (straight-through processing) acronym is now so overused by banks as to be no longer very meaningful.
In fact, it is likely to pass straight through people, especially asset managers.
In a report entitled A eulogy for STP and the asset manager, TowerGroup says: "The overexposure of STP as a marketing vehicle has made it difficult to provoke a reaction from prospects."
The research finds that descriptions of STP's benefits have become so generic that financial institutions are unable to distinguish between products and that the phrase is used to talk about too wide a variety of objectives to be meaningful.
Things that people could apparently be talking about when they say STP include electronic order routing, daily reconciliations of cash/securities positions with a custodian,
pre-trade compliance, the aggregation of portfolio data for client reporting and improved portfolio risk management.
TowerGroup warns, however, that it could be too soon to hope that the phrase will die out altogether.