A fully integrated systems environment is the only feasible path for financial trading institutions in today’s global market place.

Despite the fact that this is the common opinion heard in the industry, it is most often the case that separate front-, middle- and back-office applications are being used alongside various expert systems for each product area. Local deployments are spread around the globe, and the process of supporting interfaces and report merging requires manual, time-intensive labor.

The industry trend toward complete straight-through processing (STP) is targeting the elimination of this manual input, and slowly but surely, changing the landscape of vendors that have traditionally provided the aforementioned products. Those built around “closed” architectures are finding it hard to migrate their code base and business models, whereas those that were designed for “openness” – such as Monarque® - are experiencing a resurgence in demand because of their inherent ability to integrate easily and adapt quickly.