London-based financial software house TCAM Systems (UK) Ltd, has acquired the rights to market a settlement system developed by London merchant bank County NatWest. The system was actually developed with help from TCAM, which five years ago decided it needed to get into the security settlements market. About a year ago, County NatWest handed development of the software over to TCAM, which will now market the system badged as the TCAM Integrated Settlement System. TCAM, originally named after an IBM acronym for its telecommunications access method predecessor of CICS, is the six-year-old UK trading subsidiary of a US holding company based in New York, TCAM Systems Inc. It has a sister company also in New York, which has 65 staff and turned over the equivalent of UKP6m last year; the UK, which has 70 staff, turned over UKP4m claiming to be very profitable, pre-tax figures amounting to 15% of turnover, and growing at 50% a year. TCAM’s business is mainly in financial trading systems, and the company claims 50 US installations and 15 in the UK. It has already sold two of the new settlement systems – the first to County NatWest, running on a Hewlett-Packard HP9000 system, the other to UBS Philips & Drew Securities Ltd, also running on Hewlett-Packard Unix hardware system. Prices of the systems start at UKP300,000, and TCAM will sell a turnkey system if required. TCAM used to market its systems mainly on Stratus Computer Inc fault-tolerant hardware, but now Hewlett-Packard Co’s Unix hardware is the favoured environment, though managing director Richard Humphrey emphasises that it will support any Unix hardware that supports an Oracle relational database, on which the settlement system was built. While claiming that no-one else offers such an integrated settlement system, Humphrey sees his competition coming from ACT Group Plc’s Quotient, NMW Computers Plc and Citimax Ltd.
