Goldman to introduce single data portal

Goldman Sachs plans to replace its Financial Workbench fixed-income research portal with a new system that will centralise data and research from across the bank for buy-side and corporate clients in the coming months.

The portal, which Goldman developed internally, will offer data from all the bank’s business areas, including fixed income, equities, foreign exchange, derivatives and commodities.

Content includes Goldman’s proprietary rates, offerings, trading commentary, research – which can be sorted by company, region, industry sector or analyst – company information and graphics. The service also offers business and financial news from Reuters. All the content is streamed over the web using SSL encryption.

Each user has an individually designed home page set up by his or her Goldman salesperson.

Clients can also receive up to five market-specific ‘market monitor’ screens open independent of the portal. These screens display data for most major indexes in different asset classes. Goldman can customise screens for users, but it also provides seven default choices: for US and European fixed income, Japanese government bonds, credit ETFs, swaps, municipal bonds and forex rates, and equities.

Clients will have click-through trading over the internet via the bank’s electronic trading platform, WebET.

Diane Petan, vice-president of e-commerce, responsible for fixed-income, currency and commodity content, and head of the US roll-out, said the bank was looking to develop a single platform to cross-sell different products. Petan said when Financial Workbench was created eight years ago, there was no motivation to break down barriers between different business lines, each of which has its own databases and ways of tagging and uploading data.

The bank started rolling out the portal to fixed-income clients in Europe two weeks ago, with a target of 10,000 users online by March. Internal traders – who use the system to book deals traded over the phone with clients – began using it last October.The firm expects to migrate all users to the new portal over the next few months.