Client: Standards & Poor’s
Standard & Poor's, a division of The McGraw-Hill Companies (NYSE:MHP), is the
world's foremost provider of independent credit ratings, indices, risk evaluation,
investment research, data and valuations - 5000 professionals in 20 countries have
been providing independent and trusted expertise to the global financial markets
for over 140 years.
With the increasing complexity of financial markets over the last century, the financial
community really required Standard & Poor's rigorous and independent analysis in
stocks, bonds, mutual funds and other complex investments. The critical thinking,
opinions, news and data offered by the company have become an integral part of the
global financial infrastructure.
Project Description:
Funds-sp.com is World's #1 Site for Mutual Fund Analysis and Performance. Web Spiders
was the key architect, designer and developer in the consortium that built www.Funds-sp.com
for Standard & Poor's. This online entity is both an e-business and an extranet
platform for S&P. It allows S&P to distribute mutual fund analysis and ratings,
and offer its online subscription services to Investors, Financial Advisors, Fund
Managers and the Media.
The system runs of 7 Servers and has 50,000+ users with load balancing capability.
Besides the Web Server and Database Server, it has dedicated Charts and alerts servers
as well. It has direct data feeds into its 28 databases with over 10 million records.
Additionally there is a content management system for News and other areas, designed
for custom inputs. Funds-sp is the World's #1 Site for Fund Analysis and Performance.
(We call it the Yahoo of Mutual Funds).
The following features have been incorporated in the application to meet up client’s
requirements.
Fact Sheets
Presents all the possible information that relates to a selected fund. Funds can
be located from a navigator that has an attractive GUI and offers advanced features
like dragging to any part of the screen. On selecting a fund, the complete fact
sheet for that fund is displayed. Fund information is divided into the following
sections:
Summary – valuable fund information including launch date, latest
price, total annual charge etc.
Ratings – various rating details for the fund, if the selected
fund is a rated one
Performance – the performance statistics of the fund
Consistency – displays the consistency level of the fund over a
user specified time range
Risk return – displays important information regarding the risk
returns of the fund, charted with various business parameters.
Holdings – displays the complete status of the holdings of the
fund on an attractive chart
Awards – displays all the awards that have been won by the fund
management organization
Search – two types of Search features have been offered in the
application. These are:
Quick Search – simple, easy to use and of course really quick as
the name suggests. The user only has to type the name of the fund or fund management
company in the search box and click on the corresponding button. The search result
will be immediately displayed.
Advanced Search – customized and complex search criterion. Search
can be carried out on a fund database on the basis of the following sections:
- General Criteria
- Performance & risk
- Management & style
- Portfolio structure and composition
- Awards
- Charges info
Information can be searched specifically or in combination. with the help of search
parameters of other sections.
Advanced search offers a unique GUI with flexible individual sections. Once all
the necessary criteria are specified, a single click on the Search button does the
magic. The result of the advanced search is displayed in no time.
Tools – the following set of tools were provided for the users
Alerts – allows users to create complex criteria by setting fund
parameters and their corresponding change values, on the basis of mails that are
automatically fired by the system to the user, whenever there is a change in the
value of the specified fund, as pre-specified in the alert criteria
Book builder – allows the user to bookmark specific pages of interest
that they have visited. Clicking on these bookmarks takes the users to the desired
page.
Chart builder – allows the users to create customized charts from
the fact sheet information of a fund. Existing charts can be further edited, printed
or deleted. An additional functionality has been given through which users can copy
the source code and save it in their computer. This would allow them to view the
chart offline, anytime.
Portfolio builder – allows the users to segregate specific funds
of their interests into discrete portfolios. Users can add, update and delete portfolios
as well.
Table builder – allows the users to create a customized table based
on their unique business requirements. This is undoubtedly the most fascinating
feature of Funds-SP. Table builder allows amazing customization – almost the same
as provided by any database management system and even more.
Technical Aspects:
Platform - Windows 2000/ 2003 Enterprise
Database - SQL Server 2000 with in-built XML Support, Reporting
Services, Notification Services.
Application Server - Combination of MS.Net Framework and Cold Fusion
using Web Services
Web Components - XML, XSL, Java scripting and Flash
Other Tools - Corda’s Pop Chart Server for Dynamic Image and flash
charts