Mashups Slowly Gain Traction on Wall Street

With volatility in the financial markets at an all-time high, firms that want to trade ahead of the competition need access to as much information as possible from more sources than ever -- in as close to real time as possible -- or risk being left behind.

To facilitate this information mining, a growing number of financial firms have started turning to mashups, Web-based environments that aggregate content from multiple sources in a single tool. In fact, a recent Aite Group report says financial firms will spend $35 million on mashup technology in 2009.

According to Adam Honore, senior analyst at Aite Group and author of the report, many firms already are using traditional content aggregators -- the type of mashup with which most people are familiar -- to create market alerts, research and trading dashboards, and proprietary fundamental data sets for trading. He added that some are also using business intelligence mashups, which operate like external content aggregators except that they aggregate data from internal databases, to create virtual deal rooms to evaluate IPOs, for instance. Then there are business process management mashups, which help institutions track ongoing management issues, facilitate change management and coordinate sales efforts.

Despite the upside, however, Honore suggests in an interview with WS&T that, with IT budgets shrinking, some financial firms currently feel that there are more-pressing areas than mashups in need of investment. This is particularly the case, he wrote in the report, if a firm's management gets caught up in the "vernacular" of Web 2.0, focusing too much on buzzwords such as "mashup" and other loosely defined concepts that can be confusing to business users. If that happens, Honore noted, the odds are that they will not look twice at the business value of mashup technology.

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