One of Europe's largest banks adopts ICE to drive efficiencies in global revenue recovery

Impendium launches ICE powered by Portrait, Industry’s first turnkey Interest Claims solution for Capital Markets and Treasury Organisations

London, 6th December 2006 - Impendium Systems, a global provider of operations solutions for investment banks, announces the launch of “ICE”, an out of the box interest claims engine to generate and reclaim lost revenue across all cash and securities trades.

Powered by Portrait Foundation, ICE provides a unique solution to problems which have plagued Capital Markets and Treasury organisations for decades - the loss of millions of dollars in revenue each year due to deficient technology and manual revenue recovery processes, and the inability to minimise liabilities caused by internal errors within the organisation.

The ICE application captures and calculates all payable and receivable interest claims across multiple products. It also provides the framework for all the risk and compliance data now being demanded by the industry regulators.  ICE’s powerful functionality significantly increases revenue recovery, provides trading and sales with the correct allocations of profit and loss and minimises external costs from internal errors. Markets previously considered uneconomical such as equities and corporate banking can now achieve further efficiencies without additional expense.

A major European Investment Bank is the first organisation to adopt ICE. ICE’s functionality will facilitate additional revenue generating opportunities for the bank not usually achievable within Operations, delivering millions of dollars of revenue benefit for them in the first year alone.  In addition, the transparency and reporting will enable the bank to centralise commoditised processes, allowing specialists to add real value elsewhere.
ICE is the first of a family of products to be jointly developed and marketed by Impendium and Portrait Software.  Initial marketing has resulted in strong levels of interest from existing customers and global partners.

Stuart Clark, Impendium Global Product Manager commented, “Due to the complexity and the poor quality of static data within organisations and despite having large operational teams to manage exceptions from trade execution to confirmation matching and settlement, most organisations are lucky to achieve a 90% settlement efficiency rate.  As margins in investment banking ever diminish so the need to ensure that profit actually hits the balance sheet becomes increasingly critical to the long term success of the organisation. We’re confident that ICE is uniquely well designed to assist companies in achieving this goal.”

Recent market research has identified that the automation of manual processes by brokerage firms and the replacement of proprietary applications with off-the-shelf packages as being a key driver in IT spending growth. For example, TowerGroup predicts that total spending on derivatives software and services alone by global capital markets institutions is expected to increase from $3.6bn in 2006 to $5.75bn by 2009, a compound annual growth rate of 18%.

Nick Randall, CEO of Portrait Software plc, commented, “As one of the leaders in operations solutions for treasury and investment banking, Impendium have strong domain expertise in this growth market which we can tap into via this partnership with them. This seven figure first order received for ICE is a great endorsement of the power of the product.”

Rory McLaren, Technical Director of Impendium added, “We’re delighted to have worked with Portrait Software on the development of ICE. With Portrait Foundation many of the essential components of front-end applications are already done, leaving us to focus on designing superior operational processes based on our expertise in investment banking. We look forward to introducing further unique solutions to the market with Portrait over the coming year.”

For further enquiries: 
Impendium Systems Tel. +44 (0)845 310 4316
Stuart Clark, Global Product Manager  

Portrait Software plc Tel. +44 (0)1491 416600
Sarah Haskell, Group Marketing Director

ICIS PR Tel. +44 (0)20 7651 8688
Caroline Evans-Jones

About Impendium Systems
Impendium Systems is a solution provider that specialises in Operations solutions for Treasury and Capital Markets across multiple product classes.  
The company benefits from a strong and experienced team of business professionals with proven ability and credibility in the Capital Markets and Treasury environments.

Using proven Microsoft and Portrait Software technology the organisation provides Capital Markets and Treasury Organisations end user solutions that deliver real financial savings and improvements to control.

About Portrait Software
Portrait Software specialises in Customer Interaction Optimisation software and solutions that help organisations manage customer interactions in the most effective way to ensure a world class customer service is delivered.  Portrait Software’s solutions combine analytical capabilities with a process-centric customer interaction management platform, providing organisations with the ability to deliver the most highly optimised customer processes across all sales and service channels.

Our 200+ customers are organisations that lead the world’s most demanding customer-intensive sectors, Financial Services, Public Services and Telecoms. These include Nationwide Building Society, The Woolwich, British Telecom, the largest police force in Europe, Mapfre, Washington Mutual, Merrill Lynch, T-Mobile, Fiserv CBS Worldwide, Bank of Tokyo, Bank of New Zealand, China Automobile Association and IAG.