LONDON, July 5, 2007 (PRIME NEWSWIRE) -- CAST Software (Paris:CAS) announced today that CLS Services, the provider of operational and back office support to CLS Bank International (CLS Bank) -- the world's first global multi-currency settlement system owned by 69 of the largest global financial institutions -- has chosen CAST's Application Intelligence Platform to help better govern its outsourced application development and maintenance following a successful pilot earlier this year.
In order to ensure the ongoing quality of the platform as the bank pushes into new settlement activities, CLS Services identified CAST as a way of providing factual information on the state of their applications, allowing them to identify any deviations to agreed standards and architecture.
Mr. Sean Daly, Programme & Service Delivery Director at CLS Services (CLS) said that CAST would give CLS visibility on application quality across the application development lifecycle.
"CAST will enable us to better manage our outsourcing relationships and enhance our existing processes by providing us with invaluable information on the quality and quantity of work delivered by our application development and maintenance outsourcing partners, across technologies and platforms," said Mr. Daly. "We searched the market place and found that only CAST could provide the comprehensive, detailed management metrics that enable outsourcing costs to be justified and ensure we are getting value for money."
CLS Services oversees the daily running of the CLS Bank settlement service, which handles an average of 340,000 instructions from over 1,300 financial institutions daily with a value of US $3.9 trillion and accounts for a significant proportion of the world's foreign exchange settlements.
"The addition of CAST helps us mitigate risks associated with outsourced development and protects our key applications from downtime and failures," said Mr. Daly. "By monitoring the quality of the code delivered to CLS we are able to provide agile applications to meet market, regulatory and client needs."
"And given that it is an automated process, using CAST ensures that there is little overhead in continuously monitoring deliverables."
Also worth noting is that the outsourcing organisations that CLS works with have bought into the use of the CAST solution. "The information that CAST delivers provides the foundations for constructive discussions between us and our providers," said Mr. Daly. "It is going to help our relationships with our suppliers."
"We are continuing to see increased interest from financial services organisations as they look to better manage both their internal and outsourced application development," said Mark Slater, UK Country Manager for CAST.
"Adoption by a leading organisation like CLS shows that managing the risk of mission critical applications is becoming front-of-mind for senior IT executives within the financial services industry. Poor quality applications can be a weak link in organisations, with massive impact both on a company's reputation as well as its balance sheet," said Mr. Slater.
About CLS Group and CLS Bank
Continuous Linked Settlement (CLS(r)) eliminates settlement risk through the world's first simultaneous and irrevocable global multi-currency settlement system. The CLS service is offered by CLS Bank International ("CLS Bank"), and is supported by 69 of the world's largest global financial institutions who are shareholders of CLS Group, the holding company of CLS Bank.
One thousand three hundred and fifty-five institutions are now settling payment instructions derived from foreign exchange deals through CLS Bank. Of these, 57 are CLS Bank Members, and an additional 1,298 banks, brokers, funds and corporates are using the CLS Bank service as Member customers ("third parties"). Previously institutions had to rely on a global network of correspondents and a degree of faith that they had received their payments in one currency as they paid away another -- CLS turns this faith into certainty.
CLS Bank links to the Real Time Gross Settlement systems operated by Central Banks in fifteen currencies (US Dollar, Euro, UK Sterling, Japanese Yen, Swiss Franc, Canadian Dollar, Australian Dollar, Swedish Krona, Danish Krone, Norwegian Krone, the Singapore Dollar, the Hong Kong Dollar, the New Zealand Dollar, the Korean Won and the South African Rand). CLS Bank is based in New York and is an Edge Corporation bank supervised by the Federal Reserve.
For further information, please visit the CLS Website at www.cls-group.com
About CAST
CAST is the world leader and pioneer in Application Development Performance Management software, providing the metrics and information IT executives must have to measure, monitor and improve the quality of business applications and the performance of development teams around the globe. Founded in 1990, CAST has helped more than 600 organizations worldwide speed delivery to the business, mitigate risks in production, improve the customer experience, and reduce the total cost of application ownership. CAST is listed on Compartment C-Eurolist by Euronext Paris (Paris:CAS) and serves Global 2000 organizations worldwide with a network of 11 fully staffed offices in the U.S. and Europe. For more information, visit www.castsoftware.com.