FRI Releasing Next-Generation Software For Repo and Securities Lending Market

- FRI’s RSL.Net is the industry’s first global, real-time repo and securities lending solution based on Microsoft’s .Net platform
- Designed to provide comprehensive trading functionalities for increased efficiency and profitably to any size repo and securities lending operation
- Modular approach enables users to tailor software to meet their needs and extend and enhance their system on demand

Vienna, Austria, May 14, 2002 -- FRI Corporation, the investment management solutions company, today announced the imminent release of RSL.Net, the next generation in repo and securities lending software. RSL.Net is the financial services industry’s first global, real-time repo and securities lending (RSL) solution based on the Microsoft .Net platform for web-based services.
"Financial institutions are constantly seeking to improve their returns and maximize the performance of all of their assets," said Eligio Gaudio, President and Chief Executive Officer of FRI, introducing the new software product suite at the International Securities Lending Association’s annual conference being held here. "To do this, they are increasingly turning to the repo and securities lending market and they are demanding comprehensive, global, modular, and flexible solutions."

"We designed RSL.Net to meet these requirements. With RSL.Net, we have created the most-powerful solution available for the repo and securities lending market. The initial response from the attendees at this conference has confirmed our enthusiasm for this new product," said Dr Gaudio.
RSL.Net is multi-currency, multi-lingual, multi-entity, and capable of easily handling equity and fixed-income instruments from virtually anywhere in the world. RSL.Net offers software modules to handle all aspects of the RSL business, including repo, securities lending, portfolio risk, cash and position management, mark-to-market, and data import/export. Since it is a real-time solution decisions are based on current and accurate information.
The different offices and branches of a company can set the interfaces and rules to meet their needs and those of their parent organization for easy handling and manipulation of the information. RSL.Net is designed to provide comprehensive trading functionalities for increased efficiency and profitably for any size repo and securities lending operation.

"FRI chose to base RSL.Net on Microsoft’s .Net platform for several reasons," said Domenic Santini, FRI’s Chief Technology Officer. "The most significant reason is the integration capabilities that .Net offers through the use of XML Web services. The .Net platform allows applications to share data over the Internet, or an Intranet, regardless of operating system or programming language. When you combine the .Net platform with a leading RDBMS with robust and well-documented APIs, our RSL.Net approach will easily plug-and-play with all of a firm’s other internal and external systems. RSL.Net’s architecture, including its modularity, allows our clients easily to extend the functionality and to adapt it to rapidly changing business conditions."
Other attributes of FRI’s RSL.Net include flexible deployment options, enabling it to be installed as licensed software on client-owned hardware and networks or accessed from FRI-hosted ASP service on a 7/24 basis. RSL.Net facilitates and complements straight-through processing, offering improved control with real-time reporting, including automated exception reports. FRI provides on-line help from client service professionals on a round-the-clock basis.
"FRI developed RSL.Net as the next-generation product suite for the repo and securities lending market based on our customers’ feedback about their needs and the experience we have gained providing earlier generations of software for this market for over ten years," said Dr. Gaudio.