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Faster Data. Better Decisions?

Speedy Systems give employees at financial companies quicker access to current information.

By Marianne Kolbasuk Mcgee
InformationWeek
September 16, 2002 12:00 AM (From the September 16, 2002 issue)

Every Wednesday morning between 8:30 and 9:30, you'll find Mike Lebowitz in the same place. The manager at Fannie Mae, which packages and resells mortgages, is sitting at his PC, closely monitoring the bidding activity of dealers participating in weekly one-hour online auctions of Benchmark Bills, a type of short-term debt.

Real-time systems such as the one behind Fannie Mae's online auctions are changing the way users such as Lebowitz do their jobs and relate to partners and customers. Real-time systems are eliminating mundane work for many users, freeing them for more meaningful tasks and giving them quick access to the most-current data necessary for making better decisions.

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From his PC, Lebowitz can see which of Fannie Mae's 30 Benchmark Bills dealers are bidding, how much they're bidding, and even whether they made a typo. The system is programmed to accept bids within certain dollar ranges and immediately alerts dealers about possible errors they've entered.

Because the auction is automated and the system calculates its results, much of Lebowitz's decision- making takes place days and hours before the session. "This forces me to make a decision on Monday about what we'll auction on Wednesday," he says. Before Fannie Mae began its online auctions, auctions of short-term debt were infrequent and Lebowitz handled them manually, calling dealers and taking handwritten notes about their bids. "I'd screw up. Now that doesn't happen," he says, because the online auction is more accurate, more efficient, and much faster.

In the past, it took hours to calculate the results of phone auctions. Now, the real-time system computes results as soon as they end. "The auction is over at 9:30, and we have the results by 9:31," says Laura Simmons, director of E-commerce for Fannie Mae's treasurer's office.

On average, Fannie Mae auctions $7 billion to $9 billion in short-term debt during these weekly sessions, Simmons says. Before the online auctions, the company would issue perhaps only $500 million in debt during a manual auction, Lebowitz says. The auctions now are very predictable and transparent to dealers, he adds.

Fannie Mae's real-time system also helps Tom McGee, VP of trade agency discount notes at financial-services firm J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., do his job more easily and productively. It helps McGee catch bid mistakes in real time, errors that sometimes occur when he's reading the handwritten order of a customer for whom J.P. Morgan is bidding in Fannie Mae's online Benchmark Bill auctions. The system also lets McGee change bids and evaluate J.P. Morgan's historical bidding. "The system empowers me. It allows me better control of bids -- I don't have to call them in -- and it makes me more efficient," he says.