Financial services technology startup i-Deal LLC said yesterday that it is working with Avanade to develop its online platform for raising capital and issuing new stock over the Internet.
The startup, launched this fall by backers Merrill Lynch, Salomon Smith Barney, Thompson Financial and Microsoft Corp., picked Avanade to build a .Net-based, ASP-enabled platform for the global financial services firms to use for deal-making, raising capital and executing initial public offerings of stock over the Internet.
Although it didnt hurt that Microsoft is a primary backer for the new startup, I-Deal was looking for Microsoft-specific expertise and needed to get its system ready for production fast.
“Time was a factor,” said Frank LaQuinta, CTO at I-Deal in New York. “The fixed-income market was going gangbusters this year. We had to ramp up our internal staff and bring in a partner that could augment the staff with deep expertise in Microsoft technologies.”
I-Deal, which had already selected Windows 2000, .Net, BizTalk and other Microsoft products for its platform, took the design for the system from a legacy Merrill Lynch application. Avanade created the ASP-enabled platform using XML and .Net.
When the system goes live in the first quarter of next year, it will be able to process “any type of equity transaction,” said LaQuinta. “The goal is to bring the entire process online.” The goal is also to make it a global system. Toward that end, it will be multi-lingual.
About 20 Avanade team members collaborated with 40 I-Deal developers in implementing the system. By using the Microsoft Solutions Framework, both sides were able to work as a single unit, officials said. The system is in quality asurance testing now.