Reuters Group has claimed that than 225,000 financial services
workers worldwide - including 80,000 in the US - have signed up for
its Messaging technology launched last October.
Reuters collaborated with Microsoft to develop what is,
essentially, the first version of Microsoft's upcoming corporate IM
application, codenamed Greenwich, which is due out in June.
IBM would not disclose end-user totals in the financial services
industry for its Sametime software, but Jeremy Dies, a manager of
collaboration offerings at IBM's Lotus Software Group, said eight
of the top 10 commercial banks worldwide use Sametime.
IM is attractive to banks and brokerages because it can streamline
communications. But analysts and IT managers said uncontrolled use
of the technology could open up firms to computer viruses and to
regulatory actions by government agencies, which require that
electronic communications be logged and stored.
Products such as Sametime and Reuters Messaging include
functionality that is designed to meet the security and regulatory
compliance needs of financial services firms. In addition, the
three top suppliers of consumer IM products - America Online,
Microsoft and Yahoo! - all announced versions of their software
aimed at corporate users last autumn.
Reuters Messaging is among the first IM products, of either
commercial or consumer grade, based on the Internet Engineering
Task Force's (IETF) Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) messaging
standard. Products written using SIP will allow end users to speak
with one another across different platforms.
Lotus' Sametime does not use native SIP code, but instead uses a
SIP gateway device that does not allow streaming video or
conferencing. Dies said the SIP standard, which was being devised
by the SIP Working Group of the IETF, will soon be robust enough to
allow streaming video or conferencing natively.
Wells Fargo last year rolled out a set of Web chat and
collaboration tools for its customers. Jim Smith, senior vice
president of consumer Internet products, said Wells Fargo is
considering the purchase of an enterprise-class IM product to
support one-to-one communications internally and with its
customers.
Jim Lenz, senior vice-president and co-manager of trading at
Reuters-owned brokerage Bridge Trading, said it began beta-testing
Reuters Messaging last summer as part of an effort to cut down on
the use of unauthorised IM tools internally and at the banks and
clearing houses with which it does business.
"We heard from a lot of [users] that they needed something secure
because more and more people were using AOL or Yahoo! or something
that wasn't secure."
But the use of consumer-grade IM software remains widespread in
business environments, analysts said. A survey of financial
services firms last autumn by Osterman Research said that about
half of their end users were downloading more than one consumer IM
product for business purposes.
In October, seven top financial services firms formed the Financial
Services Instant Messaging Association (FIMA) to push vendors to
develop IM standards. But FIMA co-chairman Ursula Mills said she
did not expect the use of consumer-oriented services to stop
anytime soon.
"Many of the customers want to use the product of their choice,"
Mills said. "If that's AOL, Yahoo! or MSN Messenger, then that's
the product we want to use."