Portfolio management tool may come to the iPhone

Professional-grade financial services applications may soon be coming to the iPhone. Lab49, a consulting firm based in New York and London that specializes in designing advanced interfaces for the capital markets, has introduced a real-time portfolio management software application called Capital that is designed to run on Apple's iPhone. While the legions of BlackBerry users in the financial business are unlikely to switch to an iPhone immediately — even though the number of users of the new 2.0 3G from Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple Inc. now exceeds 1 million — the new software may make the sleek, buttonless iPhones even more popular. Users of the Lab 49 software can track the performance of assets in real time and make changes in portfolios across multiple dimensions, including strategy, industry, country and manager. In addition to permitting real-time portfolio management, the application can handle mobile work flow management as well as real-time monitoring of other applications. "Apple's iPhone 2.0 has opened up a lot of technical capabilities — they are devices with great screens, a great interface model and powerful processors that can come together to support some really elaborate data visualization," said Marc Jacobs, a Lab49 director. While the attractive application exists and functions well, it can't be used by advisers individually or by the general public. "Ours is a total-enterprise play," Mr. Jacobs said. His company expects demand to come initially from the buy side, especially hedge funds, he said. "[We think] fund managers, trade operations, groups and institutions that are a little less hamstrung by deployments of enterprisewide applications and issues ... will gravitate to the application and the iPhone's abilities," Mr. Jacobs said. "I also see demand from clearing and custodian companies which do a lot of processing and need better ways to manage work flow remotely, and are looking to monitor the status and performance of their systems," he said. The use of the system by clearing firms and custodians could enable advisers to employ the software, Mr. Jacobs said. "Traditionally, people [in the financial services arena] have had to be at their desks to respond," said Ross Hamilton, a Lab 49 director. "Today, the truth is that they are out and about." With 3G network connectivity and bandwidth, as well as the processing power available in the iPhone, financial advisers and others are able to slice and dice data wherever they are and make decisions, Mr. Jacobs said. E-mail Davis Janowski at [email protected].