No doubt, it has been a busy 12 months for WSS. It bought Trema in August, only seven months after private equity investor Warburg Pincus had acquired WSS. Trema seemed to be a natural complement to WSS, which for years had been angling to leverage its market strength among financial services enterprises into a meaningful chunk of the non-financial corporate market. Although European, Trema–under the leadership of CEO Michele
Fitzpatrick–had dramatically increased its name recognition and image in North America. Among Trema's many attributes was its development of a middle market product line and client roster, built around the portfolio that came with its acquisition of Richmond Software in September 2005. The WSS-Trema combination was expected to be a worthy opponent to SunGard AvantGard, which over the past year had also reinforced its market presence through acquisitions of Integrity and then XRT. "Since the Wall Street Systems-Trema merger was announced, management has moved quickly to combine the two organizations, sort out their strengths and decide which segments to pursue. Warburg Pincus is definitely focused on getting an effective execution model together," notes Maggie Scarborough, research manager for corporate banking at Financial Insights.

Of four major product lines that WSS will preserve, only one–Wallstreet Treasury–is
almost exclusively aimed at the corporate marketplace. That product is the old Richmond software, which Trema renamed Trema One. Trema Suite (formerly Finance Kit) emerges as Wallstreet Suite and will cover the large corporate market, as well as financial firms. The two legacy WSS systems are now called Wallstreet FX and Wallstreet Back Office. They will continue to serve their handful of existing non-financial treasuries, but will be marketed now as specialized systems for financial services companies. "It looks like they are putting a lot of resources behind bank-side products," observes Glen Solimine, CEO of financial technology provider Speranza Systems Inc. in Scarborough, Maine, "which is no surprise because that's where their higher margins are."

But behind the scenes, there is shifting as well. Jeff Wallace, managing partner of Greenwich Treasury Advisors LLC in Boulder, Colo., claims WSS has been coaxing its larger Wallstreet Treasury users to move up to its more robust Suite product. "It's now their preferred solution for large corporate treasuries," Wallace says. But WSS now seems to concede that its FX and Back Office solutions have little future in the market beyond its present clientele, which includes a short list of major names like Ford, Hewlett-Packard and Procter & Gamble, he reports.

Still, a few observers question whether the product line will have enough breadth and depth to compete head-to-head with SunGard and Thomson Financial, which has shown the most momentum in recent months in the marketplace. When describing the WSS lineup, consultant Craig A. Jeffery, managing director of Strategic Treasurer in Atlanta, argues: "It's a smile with some gold molars and missing teeth between Wallstreet Treasury and Wallstreet Suite." For the large corporate market, they don't have products that match up well against systems like SunGard's Integrity and Quantum, he suggests.

Among the less controversial parts of the strategy is WSS's decision to move all products to both on-premise and ASP models. "In the age of compliance, it is increasingly difficult, expensive and disruptive for corporations to implement new solutions, and few have the resources to support them," Scarborough says. "Hosting and shared services remove the implementation barriers."

The ASP emphasis sounds shrewd to Dawnette Blake, U.S. treasury center manager at Agilent Technologies Inc. in Santa Clara, Calif. The company uses installed Richmond software bought in June 2005. However, "we're looking at the ASP-hosted model to see how much it would reduce our cost," she says. The real savings would come from not needing IT support, she adds. "A hosted solution would keep us using the current technology without the rigorous testing required for an installed upgrade."