First Chicago Corp. has signed up for a securities processing and accounting system from SunGard Financial Systems to be installed early next year.
The banking company will migrate from the 10-year-old mainframe in its capital markets unit to a client/server system in the first quarter of 1996. The new trading system, called Global Securities Manager, will support the bank's trading in government bonds, municipal bonds, repossession and resale agreements, and money market instruments.
Designed as an open system, Global Securities Manager will run on a few different platforms and will integrate with adjacent systems. Using a graphical user interface, traders will be able to check and revise the data base.
First Chicago is spending more than $3 million on the new system, according to Richard Blum, a senior vice president in the capital markets area.
He said the local area network architecture of the new trading system will give his unit faster access to information and more overall flexibility. The upgrade could save the bank as much as $1 million a year, he estimated.
"It wasn't enough for the system we were seeking to handle today's activity," Mr. Blum said. "We're growing, and need a system that will grow with us."
The bank's capital markets division handles between 1,500 and 2,000 trades daily. Traders enter their transactions from a wide array of front- office applications, making the open and expandable nature of the new central system especially valuable to the bank.
First Chicago will be the first major U.S. bank to use Global Securities Manager, said a SunGard spokeswoman, Mary Stockdale. Current users include the World Bank, Bank of Tokyo, and the Industrial Bank of Japan.
