ING Investment Management Americas, the U.S. investment arm of ING Group, has leveraged Microsoft SQL Server 2005, .NET Framework 2.0 and ASP.NET to create a unique real-time solution for accessing and analyzing reference data. The ING application, called Relative Value Application, analyzes securities to determine their investment potential and streamlines the management and use of reference data. It gives ING employees the opportunity not only to retrieve data from multiple places, perform complex transformations and distribute the data to multiple destinations, but also to fulfill stringent reporting requirements.

The application was developed because ING Investment Management needed to be able to access proprietary market data quickly and accelerate insight by applying computational analysis to business processes across the organization, but employees felt hampered by a complex data infrastructure.

“Retrieving high-quality, up-to-the-minute reference data from multiple sources is crucial to the success of trading institutions,” said Brian Timberlake, senior analyst for the quantitative risk management division of ING Investment Management. “We needed to create a clear and concise solution for retrieving and analyzing business data from multiple sources, without sacrificing our robust reporting capabilities. We were able to meet these increasing demands by deploying the innovative and scalable Microsoft technology.”

The firm chose to develop the framework for the Relative Value Application based on SQL Server 2005 because it felt SQL Server 2005 offered developer efficiency, performance and scalability improvements. Microsoft SQL Server 2005, along with SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services, creates a platform through which employees can retrieve data from multiple places, perform complex transformations and distribute the data to many destinations.

ING's previous application had a fixed set of data choices that were computed and then stored in a database. With the Relative Value Application, employees have virtually unlimited data choices. The application framework’s performance enhancements and use of asynchronous operations to perform parallel processing allow it to compute information on the fly and present it more quickly than previous systems.

Because the application is easy to set up and scale out, it will serve as a model for future applications at the company.