Rimes Technologies Australia, a supplier of data feeds to funds managers and custodians, has introduced a tracking service allowing operations managers to pinpoint how close a file is to delivery.

Rimes’ head of Asia Pacific, Andy Barrow, said the web-based monitoring service was aimed at saving operations managers a call to the Rimes helpdesk. “The service tracks a file every step of the way from receipt at our host to delivery to a manager’s desktop, and includes a tab where clients can view the historical volatility of update times for a particular data source.” Barrow said daily updates of the MSCI World index, for example, tended to be delivered “ten to fifteen minutes either side” of schedule, but it was not unusual for Lehmann Brothers to be a couple of hours late updating its Aggregate Bond Index, owing to the complexity of the underlying issues. Rimes, a competitor to the likes of Factset, Datastream and ITG, set up a Sydney office four years ago and within twelve months its ‘SmartFiles’ service was in use by the attribution analysis team at JPMorgan Investor Services. However the downturn in international equities performance reduced the growth in the number of indices being used by local managers, and Rimes had to wait two years before another custodian, RBC Dexia Investor Services, bought its feed.