Finance Innovation

Fuji Capital Markets is putting a neat, if experimental, swap valuation calculator on its Web site that senior managing director James Kennedy hopes will turn users into customers. "It's a system that processes currency and interest rate swaps that we've had to build for ourselves over the past six or seven years," he says. "We hope it fills a niche and makes us some friends, and hopefully, even a little money." The calculator appears when a visitor clicks a button on the site (www.fcm.com). Entering the appropriate information puts Fuji's swap and yield curve algorithms to work and quickly produces a price so that anyone contemplating a swap can get free, outside pricing information. Fuji accounts for upwards of 5 percent of the world's "plain vanilla" interest rate swaps.