http://www.hindu.com/2010/09/03/stories/2010090356111700.htm

Following are the articles by The Hindu, Financial Express and Times of India

Financial Express

The Hindu

Times of india

Picture this:

-There are more than 6 leading Mobile Operating systems.
- Around 2400 form factors.
- Each Mobile OS has multiple versions and newer ones are being introduced regularly.

Fragmentation is here to stay – Differentiation being the key reason.
At this point in time it would suffice to point out the obvious – the mobile market is constantly evolving at break neck speed. It is one of the fastest growing markets and mobile companies are leaving no stone unturned to differentiate themselves and garner as much share of this seemingly ceiling free market. The advent of applications has markedly changed the game in this space. Phones are no longer being bought for ‘calls’ and ‘messaging’, rather for the exciting and limitless possibilities that applications provide to a user at the palm of his / her hand, on the go.

Having said this, now let’s explore what companies may be thinking.

It is indeed in this kind of a dynamic and exciting market place, the true benefits of a SaaS model surfaces to the fore. Today, to develop a comprehensive mobile trading or a mobile banking application, companies are considering shelling out anywhere between a $ 100K to Half a Million! This, just to create on one device. Presuming that the world economy was back on its feet and booming , companies are able to afford this kind of a spend, almost sure of recovering the costs in no time. Still does it make any sense at all? They then spend additional amounts for upgrades, maintenance, newer devices etc. Why?

To borrow from a cliché – Change is the only thing permanent – hence SaaS. Companies operating on this model have managed to disrupt existing business practices and emerged as forward thinking partners of choice.

With these known facts it is not surprising to witness more companies opening up to the idea of engaging an IT partner that operates on a SaaS model.
Consider the following benefits:

- Zero capital Expenditure.

- Pay only for what you use.

- The very DNA of the model allows for it to be the fastest time to market.

- Most agile in adapting to changes.

- With the inclusion of a Cloud Compute package, negligible server infrastructure cost.

- No more mundane ‘change management’ strategies or black-out periods.

- Adapt on the move, running.

- Greater involvement, engagement and commitment of the vendor / partner.

- Least amount of interference with company’s IT functioning. Core competency gains greater mind-space.

- Scale up and down on demand – based on traffic and content

- Save cost on running minimum number of servers during non-traffic hours.

Being improperly forward or bold is what the dictionary describes as being Sassy. Maybe it’s time.

Much to our pleasant surprise, when the time for our presentation neared at 11:15 AM, the room started filling in with curious minds and at about 11:25 AM we saw the room nearly full. A tall achievement, we felt, especially when this was just our second year at SIFMA. As Vinod, Praveen and Peter went on to propagate our Co-Create model, it slowly started sinking in that we were witnessing a change. A change in perspectives, a change in ideologies, a change in finding solutions… a change that was largely spurred by the realisation settling in with the financial services industry that mobility and cloud computing are here to stay.

As the day progressed, our booth was flocked with representatives from brokerage companies across asset classes, wealth management companies, management companies, independent financial advisors, system integrators, journalists, telecom operators and many other technology vendors. For most, the stark necessity of embracing mobility was already etched in their minds. It was our Co-Creation via the Software as a Service model, the Zero Capital Expense model and our cross mobile strategy that intrigued them.

The response and traffic that our booth received, in a way also reflected the mood at the expo this year. People were much more solution oriented and optimistic. Bigger speakers from IBM and CISCO spoke about the next gen of technological innovations in the financial services industry coming by via mobility and cloud computing. Something we have very strongly been propagating since our inception. It was rather heartening to witness that the entire industry was realising the same.

What we definitely take back from this year’s expo is the immense response that we have received and the belief that the path that we created a couple of years back is right on track in understanding the industry needs as a whole, the direction the industry wishes to take and most importantly catering to the same in the most innovative and beneficial manner.

Come this year, our mobile platform is well placed to deliver solutions for banks, wealth management companies and independent financial advisors.

Here are excerpts from Yahoo Finance which carried our Press Release:

Mobile Trading Platform Market Leader MarketSimplified to Showcase Next-Gen Cloud Hosted Financial Mobile Apps at SIFMA’s Tech Expo

CHICAGO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–MarketSimplified Inc, a provider of Mobile Trading Platforms will announce the next generation of Cloud hosted mobile apps at SIFMA’s Financial Services Technology Expo in New York. This year at the expo MarketSimplified will present on a topic seeking to unveil and explore the Co-Creation model by providing Mobility Solutions leveraging the Cloud that they are currently propagating. (June 22 @ The Hilton, New York, 11:15 AM – 12:15 PM).

Within a span of one year, MarketSimplified has already partnered and deployed Mobile Trading Applications to 5 of the Top 10 brokerages in the US among others. Currently its footprint spans across various geographies including US, India, Singapore and the Middle East.

Marc Prosser, Chief Marketing Officer of FXCM stated, “

Launching a mobile trading application was a major decision as we did not have clear visibility into infrastructure that would be required to support our clients. We had to have a scalable solution that would be able to support the activity of tens of thousands of clients on day one and MarketSimplified was able to provide us with this platform. The added benefit of working with a mobile expert like MarketSimplified is that they are focused on adapting their offering to changes in the market. They quickly allow us to release updates that clients are requesting to enhance our mobile offering.

“FXCM’s mobile trade station II is an extension of the desk-top platform and enables clients to trade the currency market 24 hours a day 7 days a week. FXCM is one of the largest currency brokers with over 150,000 live accounts traded through the platforms offered currently with substantial number of clients on the mobile platform.”

MarketSimplified’s key value propositions include:

* Mobile trading platform at a Zero Capital Expense model
* A model that provides this Software as a Service (SaaS) using FIX / API
* Across all Mobile Operating Systems, MIDs (like iPad)
* Zero CAPEX on server infrastructure using Elastic Cloud Compute.

Speaking about their experience and journey since last year, Venkat Rangan – Co-founder & CEO, MarketSimplified says,

There is a greater sense of realization and acceptance amongst brokerages on the potential that an aggressive Mobile Strategy holds in ultimately affecting their revenues. With no control over the device that their end customer chooses, brokerages are fast realizing the need to have a Mobile strategy partner who would develop and deploy the application that is compatible on every new Mobile device and Operating System introduced without having to divert from their core competence. Coupled with the benefits of Cloud Computing, we have been able to scale up our client’s incremental transactions and customer base without charging them a penny

MarketSimplified native applications operate on more than six major smartphone operating systems including iPhone, Blackberry, Windows, Android, and Palm Pre. For more information visit www.marketsimplified.com

MarketSimplified will be showcasing its offerings at SIFMA’s Financial Services Technology Expo this year at The Hilton New York, Exhibit Hall 2 – Booth 2500 between June 22nd and 24th.”

The rising popularity and usage of mobile applications in the financial services industry is paving way to opportunities never seen before. Be it CRM tools on mobile, mobility solutions for financial advisors, banking transactions on mobile or mobile trading that gives trading opportunities on the go, we are seeing the advent of newer business models solely based on mobility and path breaking strategies that seek to solve many issues that this industry has been facing and more importantly newer avenues are opening up to tap this world of possibilities a mobile devise offers. But is it that simple?

Newer devises are being launched almost every other week. To top it, Mobile OS fragmentation is here to stay and is infact on the rise.

There will never be any control over the choice of mobile devise at the hands of a customer.

In such a situation,

- How does a financial services company rationalize its mobile strategy?

- How much budget does it need to allocate to benefit from the opportunities so provided?

- Is it actually affordable to go with a cross mobile strategy?

- How does it create a unique user experience and gain customer stickiness?

- Will the mobile strategy partner be able to deploy solutions in time?

- Should it just try and develop the technology in-house?

- What is the ‘right’ mobile strategy?

Teaming up with Amazon at this year’s Financial Services Tech expo organised by SIFMA for a presentation discussion on ‘Mobility Solutions Leveraging Cloud’, MarketSimplified Inc. shall seek to address just these issues and more. To attend the presentation and know more about Mobility solutions for the financial services industry, pls note the following:

Event: SIFMA’s Financial Services Technology Expo

Venue for the presentation: Solutions Center, The Hilton New York

Date : June 22, 2010 (11:15 AM – 12:15 PM)

MarketSimplified Booth : Booth Number 2500, Ballroom Exhibit level 2 , The Hilton New York (June 22-24, 2010)

Free Registration details: www.sifma.org/techexpopass

Based in Chicago, MarketSimplified is a subsidiary of the Indian firm INXS Technologies, Ltd. The company’s customer base expands beyond the United States to India, Singapore, and Dubai. Being the largest deployed mobile trading platform across the globe, a variety of brokerage firms such as TD AMERITRADE, optionsXpress, FXCM, PFGBest, ChoiceTrade, tradeMONSTER, and IIFL are all clients of MarketSimplified.

Do visit www.marketsimplified.com to know more or mail kunal@marketsimplified.com .

Industry leaders came about highlighting the existing situation with the capital markets industry in India and various other possibilities to aim a level of 3X market penetration by 2020.

State of the Indian Capital Markets was summarized as :

• Around 85% of the turnover in markets comes from only 5 cities in India.
• India has a savings rate of around 30% , one the highest across the globe.
• There are about 550 Million Mobile users.
• There are about 80 Million Internet users
• Around 15 million direct investors in Capital Markets going by the record of 15 million existing tradable accounts.
• Market Capitalization of $1.120 Billion
• There are 2100 Brokers and 200,000 Trading Terminals
• There are about 3 Million people selling Insurance in India.

Key Questions for future were:

1. How does India increase this 200,000 trading terminals to 1 million in the next 10 yrs?
2. Is aiming for 3x before 2020 an extremely modest target?
3. How do we spur this retail participation and 100% inclusion?

The most common solution to this challenge or answers to the above question discussed were:

• To find an affordable way to acquire more clients and provide greater accessibility to the capital markets.
• To educate the potential investor on the markets and build trust and confidence.

As agreed by most present, was that, mobile will eventually turn out to be the most effective, affordable and convenient tool to achieve this. Not only will it help in achieving the penetration levels so desired, the value add that it shall provide in terms of accessibility to important information, empowerment to the self directed investor by giving them anytime action-ability and building of confidence amongst investors, among others, will ultimately improve the health of one’s portfolio and serve as a boon in this volatility prone industry.

Among the panelists, there was also a crack at SPAM on SMS misguiding investors, but like everything in life, spam reflects a cross section of it, including the stock markets, which marketers try to cold-call/communicate to the huge no. of mobile subscriber, this as you know, was to exploit the communication ability to push information unsolicited, than to provide ability to fetch information of choice on demand anywhere for the user, which is what an mobile trading application for a brokerage user would do – i.e to empower.

Market Simplified, with its existing mobile trading technological offering that already serves the most developed capital market in the world, sees itself as being a prominent partner in realizing the goals set for the capital markets industry in India.

The first technical symposium “Blackberry Developer day” on 17 March 2010 by RIM, as a forum brought in Experts from RIM, Industry experts (CEO’s of some IT firms), developers, and Media persons at the Taj Residency, Bangalore (Bengaluru) to discuss the key issues in app development, and network with other mobile app developers and marketers.

The Day was split in to six sessions spaced by tea and lunch Breaks.

The key speakers included Mr. Hossam Bahlool, Director Platform product Management RIM, Under the technical session our team heard from speakers, Mr. Larry McDonough and Alan Wong, who gave an overview of the Blackberry Architecture, API and tools. Larry spoke about how they were trying to analyze the user needs and convey the same to

Mrs. Annie Mathew Head of Alliances India, gave the welcome address, spoke about the alliance program and its benefits to the Partners. She urged developers here to create a technical forum online. There was a session for the CEO of Endeavour software, speaking about their success in developing blackberry apps.

The last session was from Mr. Barnes Lam, Director AP Alliances who spoke about how the use of blackberry has increased in the Asia pacific region and citied how Indonesians were creating wealth by creating Themes for blackberry devices. The team is also thankful to Mr. Avinash for helping them with their queries.

Finally the session was wrapped up with the Question and Answer session, our Team found the conference to be quite educating and quite a good experience on the whole, the only disappointment was that it did not deal with the technical aspects thoroughly. Well we do hope the next such session would!

Finally here are few questions from developers that were left unanswered

1. RMS data gets wiped off during OTA?
2. Persistent single raw channel
3. Developer should be able to define the name and description of the application in App World.

Chicago, IL. – February 08, 2010 – MarketSimplified, Inc., a provider of cloud hosted SaaS mobile trading solutions designed for brokerages and financial institutions, today announced that the company experienced record growth in 2009, including tripling revenues and direct customers over the course of the year with major equities, forex and futures brokerages worldwide now using MarketSimplified Cloud Hosted SaaS Mobile Trading solution. MarketSimplified also expanded device coverage to Palm Pre & Google Nexus One(Android Phone) trading applications that works across multiple wireless devices.

For the latest information follow MarketSimplified on the Web at:

* Essential MarketSimplified Brief(pdf)
* MarketSimplified Blog(this)
* MarketSimplified on Twitter
* MarketSimplified on Facebook

About MarketSimplified
MarketSimplified is best known in the U.S Brokerage Industry for its 6 week Cloud Hosted SaaS Mobile Middleware solution that offers one simple zero cost SaaS model and eradicates the need to deal with more than 6 mutually non-compliant mobile operating systems; contrary to popular belief a single mobile trading application cannot be used on all phones unlike internet trading where a single standard HTML compliant website works across computers

Today top brokerages in the world such as TD Ameritrade, OptionsXpress, FXCM, PFGBest, ChoiceTrade, TradeMonster & Kotak have chosen to be powered with MarketSimplified’s SaaS Mobility to deliver rich mobile trading experience to their customers through applications that is secure, scalable and runs on every leading smartphone in the market.

Market Simplified Inc., is the Chicago subsidiary of INXS Technologies. INXS Technologies Ltd was founded in 2006, is a startup comprising 30 passionate people located in Chennai, India. For more information, visit www.marketsimplified.com

Atleast..make a huge difference to the mobile trading experience

Features such as Reversal Scanner, Gainers Losers, Technical Events (Bearish /Bullish), Alerts are bundled along with mobile trading applications..  These help trader squickly make that decision to get into a new opportunity or to get out of one, taking profits.

Until now, most mobile applications did not posses high processing speeds  thus have been limited in power features that could be computed right on the phone, however with the entry of cloud computing, and application such as a marketsimplified, that entirely uses cloud to deliver infinite computing power and resources to even an tiny 200Mhz Mobile device !!

More such features are in the works from Market Simplified.

• High Performance
• Streamlined Messaging
• Improved efficiency(less CPU per trade)
• Automated Scaling Groups via our renowned SaaS Model
• Overall it kicks Platform Gen-1’s butt delivering significant performance boost to our customers and end-users

The Next Generation Platform is queued to go live on this sunday Jan 10th 2010, some disruptions can be seen on this sunday night due to upgrades with users on monday onwards should see significant improvements in speeds with their experience of MarketSimplified Apps.

Does your favorite broker not offer mobile trading ? – Specially when it’s Free!

Why not ask your broker via customer support to make use of Market Simplified’s renowned free-SaaS mobile trading platform that supports every smartphone on planet earth(Not just Blackberry or iPhone, but Windows, Android, Palm & Symbian), thus giving you the open path to upgrade to any smartphone of your choice without losing ability to quickly place trades.

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