Contact: Richard Lalor
Business Manager
978.694.4020
www.griffongroup.com

The Griffon Group, LLC Announces Availability of the Griffon Group Pricing System

July 1, 1999, Wilmington, MA – The Griffon Group, LLC (Griffon) today announced the availability of Pricing Central, Griffon’s state-of-the-art system for managing and analyzing pricing information received from market data vendors.

Pricing Central is a multi-currency pricing application designed to sit at the center of a firm’s pricing process. It facilitates the management of multiple vendor feeds and improves the flow and control of pricing information used by multiple systems on multiple platforms. The system can communicate with a large number of market data vendors, and simultaneously interface with multiple internal client systems including accounting, decision support, compliance, custody, data warehouse and trading systems.

Pricing Central includes an automated interface process, user-definable verification rules and flexible user-definable file formats. The system audits all critical information and supports different pricing methodologies such as generic mortgage-back pool pricing, matrix pricing of cash equivalent securities and foreign and local pricing of Thai and Indonesian securities.

"The attractiveness of Pricing Central is its rich functionality and scalability. The automation and analytical tools within the application allow users to spend more time analyzing potential pricing issues," said Richard Lalor, Griffon’s business manager. "The system is also very scalable. It can support feeding prices to one system or multiple systems enterprise-wide. It can support systems in one client office or multiple offices, even if the requirements and sources for pricing data are different between the locations. We are offering clients the tools to get the most out of their data feeds."

Clients can realize cost savings by consolidating data feeds and reducing redundant processes across multiple business groups. The system helps ensure clients have accurate prices for processes such as portfolio valuation, production of client reports or processing compliance tests. The system is capable of straight-through processing of pricing information, sending only those prices that pass the verification tests to the client systems.

Pricing Central is the first in a suite of products planned by The Griffon Group to assist clients in retrieving, analyzing and distributing market data information. "Most investment management firms face the same dilemma. If they want to change data vendors or add a new system, their IT group must code a new interface, including new translations and file formatting," said Robert Agne, Griffon’s product manager. "Our software minimizes that issue. The client simply adds a few table entries and they can begin interfacing with the new systems."

Pricing Central is a client/server application. The user interface runs on most PC desktop operating systems such as Windows 95, 98 and NT. The server portion of the application is a combination of a Sybase SQL Server database and several server processes created using C/C++. The Sybase database can run on any of the Sybase supported platforms. The C/C++ server processes currently run on HP-UX, with additional UNIX operating systems targeted for future support.

The Griffon Group, LLC, based in Wilmington, MA , develops software products and provides consulting services for the investment management industry. The Griffon Group, LLC was formed in 1997 and is a privately held company.

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