Mashups in Action: A Better Way to Trade

In past 'Mashups in Action' blog we have described mashups used in intelligence analysis, medical research, and most recently a dual-purpose community-building/data-sharing effort for a scientific community. So mashups can help make better spies, better doctors and better scientists. But other than the occasional flu shot, I don't expect most of us have much exposure to these professions.

Today's Mashup In Action story is about trading, a profession you have better odds of encountering in your daily toils. And in case you haven't cracked a newspaper in the last 9 months, this is an industry under immense pressure. With high interest rates and high home foreclosure rates, it comes as no real surprise that a venerable 50+ year-old institution like Bear Sterns could disappear in a matter of weeks or that many of its peers are losing billions a quarter. So mashups in action in this kind of turmoil is certainly something worth hearing about.

Financial Services is one of the world's oldest professions, started about 5 seconds after the 1st coin was minted. Accival, the trading division of the largest diversified financial institution in Mexico, is one of the oldest in its market and one that is known for it's innovation. They were awarded the Most Innovative Company from Information Week Mexico. Along with SOA, green and business-alignment initiatives (we created a loose translation of the Information Week article describing their efforts and their award that can be found here). And they are into mashups in a big way.

(Click on the image to see a full-screen version.)

Accival's goal was to provide real-time market information for their traders, sales force, and customers in order to take better buy/sell decisions. Like most organizations, the main impediment to this goal is disparity of the data sources including databases (often SQL Server), enterprise JavaBeans (via REST), and JMS queues (provided by Sonic). To make this happen, Accival designed an application called 'AcciFix' that provides direct orchestration between those data sources and an intranet application.

AcciFix is a robust collection of mashups and mashlets. One mashlet provides detailed information about an issuer selected by the user. The mashlet connects to a JMS queue to return real-time issuer bids and orders. There is another mashlet which provides information about issuers ups and downs, with some of the source information gathered via REST from an Java Enterprise Bean. There's yet another mashup that filters news-related information per issuer and one that lists issuers grouped by type of liquidity. (The screenshot is AcciFix with many of these mashups.)

Overall, it's an impressive collection of mashups. In an industry where failure can be cataclysmic, this kind of constant, obsessive innovation should be viewed as business-critical.