The Griffon Group, L.L.C.

Prior Experience
The members of the Griffon Group have been involved in the design, development and support of numerous applications within the investment management industry.  Several of the applications were designed around the centralization of critical market data and were designed to automate highly manual processes.  The applications added control to the process and gave the users tools to improve productivity and quality of information.

Control Applications

• Pricing

The application supported pricing over 12,000 global securities held by more than 200 mutual funds. The security types included equities, debt-instruments, and derivatives. The application also allowed the pricing group to more than double the number of mutual funds it supported while reducing headcount.

The application was designed to retrieve pricing information from numerous vendors, validate the prices using user-definable validation rules, and disseminate the prices to multiple downstream systems.

The application used leading edge functionality including an SSL interface with Reuters Selectfeed servers for near real-time pricing information.

The application supported cross-referencing a security to an unlimited number of other industry IDs including CUSIP, SEDOL, ISIN, RIC, etc. as well as numerous company IDs in use by other systems.

The application had user-definable job queries allowing users to choose exactly what information they wanted to see and when they wanted to see it.

Full audit functionality on all critical information including the user ID of the person who made the change, detail of the information before and after the user changed it, the date and time stamp of the change.

Technology: Powerbuilder, C/C++, Sybase, Sun OS/Solaris, TCP/IP

• Corporate Actions

Designed to retrieve corporate action information from numerous vendors, validate the corporate actions using validation rules, and disseminate the corporate actions to multiple downstream systems.

Supported cash dividends as well as capital changes.

System also allowed users to input necessary information to supplement any missing vendor information.

Technology: Powerbuilder, C/C++, Sybase, Sun OS/Solaris, TCP/IP

• Paydown Factors

Designed to retrieve paydown information from Muller, validate the paydowns to ensure the vendor sent all required information, and disseminate the paydowns to multiple downstream accounting systems. Included the ability to calculate estimated paydowns for processing within the accounting system.

Technology: Powerbuilder, C/C++, Sybase, Sun OS/Solaris, TCP/IP

• Reference Files

Designed to retrieve security information from an internal system and augment that information with information from a vendor. The users used the system to scrub the security master records and disseminate them to the accounting system.

Technology: Powerbuilder, C/C++, Microsoft SQL Server, Windows NT

• Mutual Fund Accounting

Involved in the development and maintenance of a mutual fund accounting system.

The system is a DOS based general ledger fund accounting application. It supported over 200 mutual funds and included support for global securities including equities, fixed income, derivatives, and currencies.

Technology: Clipper, DBase, Novell OS

• SEC Yield

This application allowed users to calculate a 30-day static SEC yield based on information fed from the accounting system.

Technology: Powerbuilder, C, Sybase, Sun OS, TCP/IP.

• NASD Limitation on Asset Based Sales Charges

The application allowed users to verify compliance to SEC regulations regarding investment company sales charges. The rules are outlined in Article III, Sections 26(b) and (d) of the NASD Rules of Fair Practice.

Interfaces to accounting and transfer agency systems were built to obtain data necessary for verifying compliance.

Multiple access levels were implemented to provide varying levels of functionality for the users. Full audit functionality was created to track user modifications to sensitive data.

Technology: Visual Basic, Microsoft SQL Server, NT, TCP/IP