In a flurry of activity, Eagle Investment Systems this month beefed up its data offerings in an alliance with FT Interactive Data and linked with Charles River Development to develop links between their systems for STP implementations.

The deal with FTID allows users of the browser-based Eagle Portal to access real-time pricing data. The move is a response to market demand for real-time investment data, adding to the descriptive, corporate action and end-of-day pricing that Eagle already provides to its investment management client base. The FTID data covers some 3.5 million securities and daily valuations of 2.5 million fixed-income instruments.

The deal with Charles River covers the joint development of an interface between the Eagle Pace data hub and portfolio management system and Charles River’s integrated portfolio management, compliance and order management suite, including the Charles River Trading System (CTRS). The interface will allow data that has been validated and scrubbed on the Eagle system to be easily transferred to Charles River’s systems.

Peter Lambertus, president and chief executive of Charles River, says the development would ensure that users “have complete and accurate data right from the start,” adding that this could “shave weeks or months off of an initial implementation”.

The first phase of the development, already under way, is scheduled for release in the second quarter of this year. This release will include the ability to transfer and process security master files, account holdings, pricing and other security analytics data between the two systems.

Later this year, the second phase of the development will include integrated job scheduling, reporting, compliance rule assignments and the receipt of trades from CTRS, the order management system, into Eagle Pace.

Eagle, acquired by Mellon Financial in November 2001, says the browser-based Pace system can “extract, scrub, enrich and store investment data from unlimited sources into one data repository” and has been designed to integrate disparate analytic and market data with portfolio accounting and trade data across a range of asset types.

The Charles River Trading System is a automated portfolio management and order management system that supports modelling, electronic trading via FIX, pre- and post-trade compliance monitoring and support for all security types.

Eagle has undertaken a number of initiatives in the reference data space recently. At the end of last month, it held a joint meeting with Cap Gemini Ernst & Young to address the issues raised by reference data management. At the event, Lou Maiuri, Eagle chief operating officer, said: “We are finding that a majority of financial services firms view the management of reference data as a first or second IT priority.”