Pivot Solutions today announced that America Online has certified the connection between IMTrader, the Boston-based company's secure trading and instant messaging technology, and AOL Instant Messenger. The certification ensures that the connection is not vulnerable to failing when AOL makes changes to its IM technology.

That's critical because, according to Pivot Solutions CEO Furqan Nazeeri, "Instant messaging has become the lifeblood of the trading floor, and IMTrader allows traders to use IM as a front end for accessing financial information from a broker's system and conducting trades through an IM window."

In the heat of a trading day, that can be critical. "From a practical point of view, instant messaging is useful simply by helping to eliminate errors," said Nazeeri. "Over the phone, 'Buy 50,000 IBM' sounds a lot like 'Buy 50,000 IPN' and there are wide classes of errors that can be reduced by having things typed out and integrated without rekeying."

Because of its now-certified and licensed connectivity to AOL Instant Messenger the latest release of IMTrader offers new features designed to maximize a trader's experience with instant messaging. Importantly, IMTrader is able to convert instant messages into electronic trades using the industry-standard FIX (financial information exchange) protocol.

"A broker might say that Cisco is going to be moving on pre-open news, and you say, 'Great, b50k cisco,'" said Nazeeri. "IMTrader would understand that as a trade and would step in and offer a challenge response to the buy side, send it to the broker's trading system, and send back an acknowledgement. It's a virtual buddy on top of an existing communication."

AOL management is naturally pleased with the strength of Pivot's application of its popular IM technology. "IMTrader is a valuable tool that leverages AIM in an application designed for one of our most active and demanding user bases," said AOL vice president Brian Curry.

For more information, visit www.pivotsolutions.com, and www.aim.com.