National Financial Services LLC has started building a series of upgrades to its StreetScape broker workstation used by 300 correspondents and independent broker-dealers around the country.
It has also commenced a major overhaul to its accompanying consumer portal called myStreetscape.
These represent the first in a fresh series of technology upgrades to be rolled out in coming months.
National Financial will be both borrowing and sharing technology and research capabilities with other parts of the larger Fidelity family of companies and groups, including the Fidelity Institutional Wealth Services WealthCentral platform used by registered investment advisers.
“This is the best of Fidelity technology being brought together,” said National Financial president Sanjiv Mirchandani in a meeting with
Investment News on Wednesday.
Several fee-based tools, drawn from WealthCentral, were rolled out on Streetscape in the fall of 2010. These included a mix of new and updated features for account grouping and account management, block trading, portfolio modeling and re-balancing.
As for the coming enhancements (some currently in a limited pilot, others just in development), the most noticeable to the 100,000 users of StreetScape will be the re-designed interface. It will take advantage of several navigational and organizational elements originally developed for the WealthCentral platform, now in use by more than 600 RIA firms.
Adobe
Flex technology has been used in the new interface design. It allows for more fluid and granular display of data on web-based applications like StreetScape, as well as real-time refreshing of screens without re-loading all of a web page.
Market data and research capabilities have also been extended for Streetscape and myStreetscape. There are new trading features for StreetScape as well, including support for conditional orders (according to a prepared statement this equates to how an adviser can set triggers for stocks and options based on price movement or indices) and “trailing stop trading capabilities” (again, defined in a statement as either a stop loss or stop limit order whereby the price of the stop adjusts automatically when market conditions move in an investor’s favor). In addition to the trading capabilities the extension of margin credit on international securities is also being added.
Thomas McCarthy, a senior vice president of product management at National Financial, said the householding features on the platform would be in a limited pilot later this year and rolled out in production in 2012.
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