The Trading Floor, Buy and Sell side, and e-banking have been leaders in implementing the latest information and communications technologies. As a whole, the latest business trends dictating these industries can be summarized by :

• The T+1 deadline
• The need to lower transaction costs -- in terms of bypassing the intermediary and decreasing the settlement cost
• Extended Risk measurement, control and management
• The ‘commoditization’ of market data
• The construction of the industry’s standard referential data and semantic
• The consolidation of the national and local stock markets into global exchanges
• All electronic trading in Europe, Asia-Pacific and Americas; with fully electronic exchanges for Equities, Bonds and Listed Derivatives or ECN for Debt, Currency and Commodities products
• Automatic trading.

To the above we can add these technology trends :

• Straight-Through-Processing (STP) implementation: The challenge of integrating front, middle and back office within the same firm and inter-broker
• Billing and mediation: Optimize the cost of ownership and billing to internal consumer
• Maintain Information Security for more and more open systems
• Centralize and increase the ease of IT management (shared infrastructure, one global team)