When clients of JPMorgan’s Eu-ropean Credit Department get out of a meeting or return to the office after lunch, they can get a quick view of what the market’s been doing by glancing at CreditMap on their desktop.

Built on Panopticon’s heat mapping technology, CreditMap integrates live pricing, historical pricing, credit research, and online trading.

“It’s very good if you come back from a meeting and want to see what’s going on in the marketplace,” explained Silvio Oliviero, who is in charge of European eMarketing (fixed income) at JPMorgan Securities in London. “Through the heatmap they can easily visualize the market by sector, maturities or individual issues that are active.”

Although traders can use it, JPMorgan targets portfolio managers with this visualization tool. A trader wants to see exact levels at which to execute, while a portfolio manager wants to see a broad view of what is happening to his portfolio in the marketplace, said Oliviero.

“He can see real prices, or the change from yesterday, or going back a week, a month or a year. If he sees something widening a lot today, he might look at two months across a sector. He can visualize very quickly, and then link into research, even for a sector he is not invested in yet,” said Oliviero. “The first thing he wants to know is how is the sector performing. A graph can show an equity or a bond, but a sector is very hard to see with a market data system. With this, however, you can look at something like telecoms over the past two months. It provides a very good heartbeat of the markets.”

Reuters agrees. It has signed an enterprise-wide deal to integrate Panopticon’s visualization into its products.

Market participants confront mass amounts of data, both real-time and static, said Paul Doody, global head of sales and trading products at Reuters. The deal with Panopticon allows Reuters to use the treemaps across its entire product suite, but the company will start with its Web displays to provide users a quicker and clearer way to view and analyze static data. The second phase will be for real-time data on the Reuters 3000 extra desktops, running the Windows XP operating system.

“Panopticon has the ability to manipulate vast amounts of data,” he added. The first Reuters rollout worldwide will appeal to buy-side managers who want to manipulate large quantities of fundamental data, such as a bucket of instruments they might want to drill down into. When Panopticon is available on the desktop, Reuters expects that it will appeal to active traders who can look at the interface, ask why one square is bigger or growing faster, and then act on it.

Reuters selected Panopticon after looking at a number of vendors, Doody added.

“Their ability to handle the real-time information was a very interesting differentiator,” he said.

Handling large volumes of data is Panopticon’s strength, said Willem De Geer, CEO of Panopticon.

“We can present up to 100,000 instruments and data points in one picture. The second key aspect is how quickly you can update that view. We are the only people in the visualization space who can update in real-time because we have a very efficient data model which allows as many updates as you want per second. Reuters had very good data and we have a visual overlay,” De Geer said.

The Reuters alliance will allow Panopticon to grow in foreign exchange and commodities.

“That was an area we had hoped to expand, but we lacked the underlying data,” De Geer said.

Reuters and Panopticon have already launched data visualization tools in the Nordic region. In equities, Panopticon helps users see buys, sells, recommendations and research, while in fixed income it can show tightening and widening of the spread, which traditionally has been difficult to see.

Asset managers want a consolidated view of market data, proprietary data, risk data, and in some cases they also want to link with portfolio management tools, he added.

“If they have multiple managers and multiple funds, they need to be able to consolidate the numbers,” said De Geer. Tree mapping also helps on the flip side – when an asset manager wants to break down consolidated positions by manager, country or assets.

De Geer said the tool also works well in customer relationship management (CRM).

“In CRM today it is very difficult to get a bird’s eye view of what is happening, who is selling what to whom,” he said.

Panopticon has recently launched a .NET version of its software that improves user access and control.

“You actually get a treemap application, using live data, installed and up and running in 15 minutes,” said Markus Skyttner, CTO of Panopticon.

Financial institutions spend up to 50 percent of their IT budgets on integration; Panopticon's .NET reduces those costs dramatically, Skyttner said. It enables companies to use visualization as a navigation hub, connecting different systems and acts as a catalyst for a new generation of business applications.

www.jpmorgan.com

www.panopticon.com

www.reuters.com