Thomson Financial continued to add functionality to its strategic wealth management platform last month with an agreement to offer Scivantage’s account management capabilities to its Thomson One Wealth Management system. The move is the latest in a series that has seen Thomson look outside for additional functionality for what it has identified as a strategic area of its overall business.

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Salesforce.com this month unveiled plans for a wealth management edition of its CRM capabilities, based around a so-called circle of success – the group of vendor organizations with which it has worked to implement the 25,000-position Merrill Lynch branch network. This circle includes Thomson Financial, Dow Jones, Cisco and Dell.

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Spotfire Inc., a provider of visual analytical software, has launched Spotfire Asset Management, a data management and display application that helps buy-side managers, analysts and traders create visual displays of market, client and other data used in the investment process. The 10-year-old U.S./Swedish company, with a background in life sciences, oil and gas, and the intelligence services, is seeking to capitalize on the growing requirement for better ways to deal with the huge amount of data at the disposal of portfolio managers.

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Thomson Financial jumped headlong into the private client investment management space this month with the acquisition of Belgium-based eXimius N.V. The purchase positions Thomson squarely in the private banking and wealth management marketplace, with a front-office integration offering that ultimately will itself be integrated with the Thomson ONE delivery platform.

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UBS Wealth Management USA has launched its Diversified Return Strategy managed account programme using Integrated Decision Systems’ (IDS) GIM Wealth Management platform. The UBS DRS service is designed to maximize the excess return a manager generates above market benchmarks, combining traditional methods of risk reduction with a methodology that allows investors to diversify assets in a combination of management styles.

Jumping on the management bandwagon, Dow Jones has launched Dow Jones Wealth Manager, developed in alliance with Client Dynamics. The service is aimed at helping financial advisers build deeper relationships with their clients. It includes Dow Jones’ various electronic services, including Dow Jones Newswires, the Wall Street Journal, Barron’s and Smart Money, and allows firms to integrate their own proprietary information in order to fit the individual profiles of their high net worth customers.

Our first encounter with the U.S. retail brokerage marketplace came about in late 1987 or early 1988, when our colleague, Eamonn Quinn, then editor of Banking Technology magazine – now owned by Informa – received a phone call from Bernie Weinstein. The then head of IT at E.F. Hutton, we heard, was leaving the company following the firm’s acquisition by American Express Shearson. Weinstein was in the midst of a major project to roll out Hutton’s state-of-the-art quote-terminal system to several thousand users. Weinstein walked out of Hutton and over to Thomson, who backed his plan for a new vendor to be called ILX Systems and run by himself and partner Norman Epstein.

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