Trace Financial signs two to Transformer product

Monday 9th February, 2004

Trace Group plc has today announced to the London Stock Exchange that its subsidiary, Trace Financial Ltd, a leading supplier of Information Technology solutions, has signed two contracts for its recently launched TRANSFORMER product.

TRANSFORMER is a new pure Java technology based package that advances message transformation to a new market leading level.

The first sale is to a major tier one bank for worldwide adoption and the second to Kinnect who are the new technology solution provider, sponsored by Lloyd's of London, to improve systems connectivity in the insurance industry.

Financial Institutions involved in global trading are being increasingly challenged by their ability to collaborate and integrate using complex and constantly evolving messaging standards. The key technology issue will not be networks, protocols or connectivity, but the ability to transform data and permit effective dialogue with disparate institutions and services. End users will wish to implement new best-of-breed solutions whilst, at the same time, generating and receiving the proprietary messages of legacy systems.

TRANSFORMER has been designed to meet these needs and enables enterprises within the financial services industry to move to a single messaging standard. The business meaning of messages is decoupled from their physical format representation by definitions within a data dictionary, enabling financial sector organisations to take early advantage of these message standardisation initiatives with less pain and less cost.

The TRANSFORMER solution combines over 20 years' experience from Trace with the latest messaging standards and leading edge development technologies to provide the foremost message transformation tool available for today’s financial institutions.

Phillip Bungey, Customer Operations Director of Kinnect, commented, "The commercial lines insurance sector has a very complex and varied data structure. This makes the electronic transfer of data difficult between the many different parties involved in the insurance process. We have created Kinnect as a solution to that problem and see TRANSFORMER as playing a vital role in this area."

Richard Wolfe, Chief Executive of Trace Group plc, commented, "Trace continues to invest in new and innovative products of which Transformer is the latest and we are delighted to have gained two such prestigious early adopters. We are continuing to implement new features within Transformer with the aim of ensuring that it remains a leading edge product."