Category: Large Scale Web System

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 the 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 and allows it 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, 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. In addition there is a content management system for News and other areas 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 some of the 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 in a beautiful 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

All these can be searched individually or can be combined with the 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 bases 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 the specific pages of the users interest that they have visited. Clicking on the specific bookmarks takes the users to the page that they have bookmarked and wants to visit repeatedly.

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 in which the users can copy the source code and save this in their computer 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 customized table based on users own 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:

“Please let me say well done and thank you. Your team has really moved mountains. Your achievements, professionalism and courage has made me a big supporter.”
- Paul Barnes - Director (Markets and Strategic Development, Standard & Poor's)