Princeton Financial Aims For Front Office

PRINCETON, NJ--Veteran portfolio management vendor Princeton Financial Systems is aiming for the trading room with a raft of new front-office products, including a trade order management system.

The entire suite, known as Frontline, is slated to go into beta tests at three client sites shortly. Those tests are expected to run through the remainder of the year with an official launch in 2000, says Jim Houghton, senior vice president of product management at Princeton.

The modules, which will be rolled out together, include Frontline Modeling, which lets portfolio managers create and apply models and generate proposed orders; Frontline Compliance, which helps users adhere to clients' regulatory and investment guidelines by verifying compliance issues prior to trading or allocation; and Frontline Order Management, which gives money managers control over the order management process from order generation through allocation.

Houghton says the move into the front office will allow Princeton to provide straight through processing and capitalize on its middle- and back-office offerings. "There's an advantage to offering an integrated solution to round out our suite of products," he says. Frontline will be able to connect to the back office out of the box via PAM for Securities.

Connections to third-party order execution systems will be provided in future releases and as clients demand them. "It's easy to create an adapter to other systems as clients demand it," Houghton says. Princeton already has some front-office components in the PAM suite, but "this is more of a migration, a rounding out," he says.

The suite will also be fully FIX-compliant, says Houghton, allowing automated communication with brokers and alternative trading systems. Princeton is currently developing alliances with different vendors for different FIX connectivities and plans to embed a third-party FIX engine in the product. "The alliances will provide the engine and network connectivity," Houghton says.

The entire suite was developed with Java and is based on a message-oriented architecture, which allows the system to be open in terms of database platforms and other infrastructure components. Java Message Service lets Prince ton incorporate various messaging middleware products without relying exclusively on one middleware solution.

"It's a departure from the traditional client/server [structure]," says Houghton. "It sets us apart and allows us to fully scale for large organizations and promote liquidity."

Princeton also plans to connect to Electronic Communications Networks (ECNs). "A lot [of ECNs] are moving toward FIX," Houghton says. "We're hoping to use their networks or engines to communicate to other ECNs. We're looking at other ECNs for specific connectivity." Island, Archipelago and Instinet are "high" on Princeton's list, he adds, but the company will talk to the beta clients before deciding which ECNs should be first.

Clients will be able to run Frontline as a client application or a Java applet within a Web browser.