A.W. Bertsch Takes Eze Castle's Ez-Exchange

NEW YORK--A.W. Bertsch is private-labelling Eze Castle Consulting's new ez-exchange 2.0 to connect its New York Stock Exchange floor brokers directly to its institutional clients. A.W. Bertsch also plans to install the rest of Eze Castle's trade order management suite soon.

Ez-exchange, which Eze Castle developed in an effort to provide money managers with a secure way to send transaction data both internally and externally, "allows a trader on his desk a direct connection to the floor," says Matt Fox, chief technology officer at A.W. Bertsch.

How does it work? Using the ez-exchange server and A.W. Bertsch's messaging servers, a trader sends a request for information to the exchange floor, where it stops at a booth and is then routed to the broker's wireless device. The broker then transmits a response from the device that is sent over the exchange's External Access Network to a private mail server and then over the Internet as e-mail to the trader.

Fox says there are two phases to the implementation. Phase one is getting the ez-exchange system up running. That should happen "within the next month," he says. Phase two is sending orders--not just floor looks--directly to a floor broker using Eze Castle's trade order management system, Trader's Console. Fox says that as with ez-ex change, messages--or orders--would be sent back and forth using a handheld device that links to a server. But rather than using the Internet as the third router, the plan calls for a secure network or connection. That's still in the works, Fox says. He declines to specify a time frame.

With ez-exchange, firms can communicate directly over internal and external networks. It uses a 160-bit encryption algorithm for privacy and security. Firms can also assign levels of access to each user on the system. The system allows for one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many conversations. Client access and other configuration parameters are controlled by the party that hosts a server. The server is designed to allow secure, encrypted communications on either internal networks or over the Internet via TCP/IP.

Using Microsoft natural language agent technology, a high priority message can be delivered and displayed in text and can be converted to voice to create an audible version of the message. "We have also embedded the agent technology into our trade order management system Trader's Console," says David Quinlan, Eze Castle executive vice president. "We have found it very useful in helping traders to manage the flow of FIX-based messages coming in and out of the system."

Ez-exchange also supports "formatted" chat, allowing a user to pre-define a record type and then send and update fields in a formatted message.

The product is available as an integrated part of the Eze Castle Trade Order Management Suite or as a stand-alone client/server application and is the first of many Internet-deployed applications from Eze Castle. Clients can download the application from the ez-exchange Website at www.ez-exchange.com or the A.W. Bertsch Website at www.awbertsch.com/. Two other clients have already purchased Ez-exchange, as well, Eze Castle officials say.