Morcom: Details from a demo

To give you more of a flavor for J.P. Morgan Clearing Corp.’s new Morcom brokerage platform I’ve written…

To give you more of a flavor for J.P. Morgan Clearing Corp.’s new Morcom brokerage platform I’ve written up some of the notes taken during the in-depth demonstration I received a few weeks ago from Russell Cassar, head of technology for the Broker Dealer Service group within JPMorgan.
Thanks to space limitations I simply could not go into much detail on the new platform in my recent print column (read the column if you just want a straightforward overview of the platform).
According to Mr. Cassar, when it is boiled down Morcom is really a series of around100 applications, some legacy others brand new.
“Our goal has been to build the best broker workstation on the Street and it is one of the biggest projects I’ve seen in my career — over 650 people have worked on this [at one point or another],” he said adding that the platform currently clears about 800,000 accounts from the 200 broker-dealer clients that work with J.P. Morgan Clearing Corp.
He added that a lot of emphasis has been placed on ergonomics and navigation and that JPMorgan even has an in-house design and usability team that focused on these aspects.
Thanks to use of Flex the teams have been able to easily build in left and right mouse click functionality and will be adding more as the workstation matures and requests are received by users.
In addition, the “Jump to” bar has auto-complete built into it so that by typing in a few letters an adviser will get back a list of related interface locations they have frequented.
“The layout manager is what allows us to run multi-monitor installations,” he explained, “which is how most of our brokers work — trading on one screen and market data on the other.”
Currently, the trading data is 20-minute delayed but will be shifting to real time streaming data later in the year.
And since it is a brokerage platform a lot of work has gone into developing multiple ways in and out of Morcom’s trading tools based on context, whether you need to make trades for a particular client from within their account or need to handle trading for your book of business.
“We’ve invested well over $10 million [in the] equity option and mutual fund trading areas alone,” said Mr. Cassar.
He explained that much of the core trading engine originated with the heritage Bear Stearns system.
“It ran hot hot hot in multiple data centers and hasn’t had a production hiccup in years,” he said.
Using the new Morcom interface he explained that it is easy for a broker or adviser to make multi-order tickets and execute them or carry out rebalancing.
“Mutual fund capabilities are also very important, we put in a breakpoint calculator, goes out using NewRiver and Morningstar data to look across the household to get the return on assets values accurately,” said Mr. Cassar.
He went on to show me that Morcom has a mini-CRM application that can be opened and added to at any time to say, provide notes or context for an account.
Providing real time accurate balances was another of JPMorgan’s priorities in developing Morcom, especially the ability to have real time margins and to be able to take advantage of the equity in multiple accounts or viewed as what some advisers refer to as “family-based margin.”
There is also the ability to carry out multi-currency transactions.
At this point Timothy Foley, an executive director at JPMorgan who heads up its product development team, chimed in to say that both of these features are “things that some of our competitors don’t have.”
Those working on Morcom are also proud to discuss their own benchmarking of the platform as well. While I won’t name the competitor they flamed here because I have not had time to get their feedback, the Morcom folks claimed their platform had proved “at least five times faster” in terms of trade order processing.
“We’ve had guy in the branches trying this out and it shows well to our prospects,” Mr. Cassar said.
Another large expenditure in terms of Morcom development went toward the building of additional data centers: $25 million to be precise.
That investment provides for what the JPMorgan folks said is instant failover.
“Our tax lot accounting engine itself was also a big investment,” he said, adding that not only did they expand its capabilities but also built it to meet the coming 2011 cost basis regulations.
“We are actually rolling that out at the end of November. That will adjust basis for wash sales,” said Mr. Cassar, adding that JPMorgan had partnered with Silver Management to build this into their engine.
From here we segued into a discussion of reporting. Morcom allows firms to customize their reports and bundle many different customized or canned reports that can be set so that the client receives the same ones each time to allow for consistency.
JPMorgan also has plans to take Morcom mobile in 2011, at least for Blackberry and iPhone users.