Susquehanna Takes the Brass Ring

NEW YORK—SunGard recently added another private equity firm to its list of Brass order management system (OMS) customers, the vendor announced.

Susquehanna International Group selected Brass for the trading, market access and compliance of its over-the-counter (OTC) and listed securities trading business, say officials at the firm in a statement. Specifically, Susquehanna will utilize Brass EnGard and Brass Broker Direct U2 as well as other components of Brass' order, execution and compliance management platform, according to SunGard officials.

The Brass installation will replace an existing, proprietary system at Susquehanna. When complete, the service will be used by more than 100 Susquehanna users, SunGard officials say.

Susquehanna was impressed by Brass' functionality and "the willingness of the Brass management team to work with us as a vendor partner," says Alan Goldberg, associate director at Susquehanna. The firm was also drawn to the EnGard solution, Goldberg says.

EnGard is a real-time, Web-based compliance solution for equities trading. It includes a data warehouse that takes in data from firms' order management and market access applications and a rules engine that evaluates transactions that come into the system and runs them against a set of business rules, which will trigger an alert if necessary. The underlying relational database is from Sybase, and the front end is running against the Microsoft .Net framework. The C++-based back end runs in the Unix environment (DWT, June 19).

"Susquehanna is compliance-focused and we believe EnGard will help us," Goldberg says. The offering is "in line with our requirements."

Recently, the New York-based Prudential Equity Group selected the Brass OMS from SunGard as its trading platform for listed and Nasdaq Stock Market securities, according to SunGard officials. Prudential traders will use Brass for automated routing and the execution of order flow within a hosted, application service provider (ASP) delivery environment. Using Brass, Prudential will be able to leverage a single platform for order management and direct market access (DMA), SunGard says (DWT, Oct. 16).