Largest Provider of Commercial Smalltalk
Cincom is one of the largest commercial providers of Smalltalk, with twice as many partners and customers than other commercial providers.
Tom Nies
JP Morgan
Cincom Smalltalk™ Helps JP Morgan Consistently Beat Their Competition
JP Morgan Chase is a leading financial services firm serving capital markets throughout the world. With assets of $2.45 trillion and a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, capabilities include investment banking, research, private equities, investment management, private banking, and treasury and security services. As one of the world’s leading investment banks, it has extensive relationships with corporations, financial institutions, governments, and institutional investors worldwide. The firm provides a full range of investment banking and commercial banking products and services, including advising on corporate strategy and structure, capital raising in equity and debt markets, sophisticated risk management, and market-making in cash securities and derivative instruments in all major capital markets. It also commits the firm’s own capital to proprietary investing and trading activities. One of the key elements of JP Morgan’s success is based on one of its differentiators, the time-to-market of new products. Supporting this is a commitment to use information technology to provide this competitive advantage.The Kapital System
JP Morgan has developed Kapital, the world’s most advanced financial risk management and pricing system that supports Interest Rate Hybrids and Credit Hybrids trades. It empowers hybrid derivative businesses to trade large volumes of highly complex financial instruments with ease and simplicity. The Kapital System is built on the Cincom Smalltalk development platform. There are two main differentiators that have set JP Morgan and the Kapital system well above the competition. The two concepts that sound very simple but are vital to JPMorgan’s success are the time-to-market of new products and the scalability of the offering.Why Cincom Smalltalk?
JP Morgan chose Cincom VisualWorks over other main-stream development languages, including Java. What was it about Cincom Smalltalk that made JP Morgan make this decision? Productivity, scalability, portability and flexibility. Dr. Colin Lewis, Vice President at JP Morgan, comments,“A key factor that has justified using Cincom Smalltalk, above and beyond the technical capabilities that it offers, is the productivity that it has delivered. The key is that our development resources do not necessarily need to be Smalltalk ‘experts.’ We have estimated that if we had built Kapital in another language, such as Java, we would require at least three times the amount of resources to develop and maintain the application. Because of the rich toolset within Kapital, we believe we have a truly awesome financial RAD environment. Without Kapital, we would not be market leaders. With such a high productivity factor that Smalltalk gives us, reaction times to market changes have enabled us to beat most of our competitors.”Using Cincom VisualWorks to develop Kapital, JP Morgan met the challenge of finding a development environment that deals with the complexity of its derivative products, delivers unparalleled productivity to stay ahead of the competition and offers the scalability to support extremely high trading volumes.
