Premier Solutions Ltd. announced last week it is developing - with Bankers Trust's help - data warehousing software aimed at trust banks and other institutional investment managers.
The Malvern, Pa.-based vendor, which markets global custody and investment accounting systems to banks and other financial firms, said it is developing "an asset management data warehouse and information retrieval system."
"This product won't be exclusive to the trust industry," said Paige Miller, director of product planning at Premier. She said the system will be marketed to banks, investment advisers, insurance firms, and other institutional investors.
Data warehouses have become a hot topic in banking technology circles these days, as the financial industry grapples with how to get a more comprehensive understanding of client relationships.
Data warehouses are computer systems that cull vast troves of customer, transaction, and demographic information from a variety of sources, and then store it in a way that lets users slice and dice the details to their liking.
Premier officials said they will develop two software packages as part of the project: a Microsoft Windows-based information retrieval system called InfoHarbour, and an asset management data repository called DataHarbour. The two software packages are expected to become commercially available in the second quarter of next year, Ms. Miller added.
The software will be based on the client/server computing design, which uses networks of personal computers to process information.
Bankers Trust New York Corp. uses Premier's mainframe-based global custody accounting system. Premier will use a data retrieval system already developed by the bank, called BT World, as a prototype for InfoHarbour.
In 1993, Bankers Trust introduced BT World, a Windows-based workstation now used by more than 200 of the money-center's corporate trust and custody clients to access and manage their accounts. And last year, Wilmington Trust Co. licensed BT World to resell it to its own trust customers.
"We'll be consulting with Premier to help them take what we've done with BT World to redesign it for a broader market," said David L. Hinds, president of BT Financial Services Information Systems Corp., a subsidiary of Bankers Trust. "We believe the financial industry will welcome the opportunity to utilize powerful new data warehouse technology, without having to make the large investment typically involved in warehouse development."
Ms. Miller said basing the new data-mining workstation on BT World gives Premier a valuable head start. "Bankers Trust has been working with several hundred clients over the past two years to refine what the requirements are for this type of data delivery workstation," she said.
