Data processing: financial – business practice – management – or co – Automated electrical financial or business practice or... – Finance
Reexamination Certificate
1998-04-02
2002-04-30
Stamber, Eric W. (Department: 2163)
Data processing: financial, business practice, management, or co
Automated electrical financial or business practice or...
Finance
C026S034000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06381587
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
The present invention relates to a system and method for tracking products and services usage; and more particularly to a system and method of storing information about vendor contracts, user entitlements to the vendor products and services and requests for a product or services, as well as tracking changes in a database. The system and method allows for comparing costs charged for the requests and actual usage against vendor invoices. The system and method can handle different vendor billing methods such as flat fees, a fee per request, monthly tiered fees and various methods of applying a discount. The system and method can also track changes in user entitlements to different vendor products and services.
A preferred embodiment shows the invention being applied to the financial services industry. Financial institutions such as major banks, brokerage houses, insurance companies and the like rely on information provided by specialized financial and market data service providers. Many financial institutions may subscribe to well over 100 different national and international news and price feed information services. A typical large bank may spend an average of $12 M annually on such services.
Within the large financial institutions, individual users, such as analysts, traders and the like will be entitled to have access to particular market data products and services, generally determined by their department or division, as is appropriate for that user. Typically, a centralized management department, typically a help desk function, within the company will assign the access rights for a particular user to a particular product or service. A user's unique set of available market data services, or entitlements needs to be managed and tracked. These entitlements, for example, can change or remain with a user if that user changes departments, or moves its physical desk.
Typically, physical moves within a company or between departments are frequent, especially at banks or other financial institutions and there is a higher-than-average turnover ratio in the financial services industry. For example, in many banks, two-year training programs for analysts start every summer and service entitlements must frequently be added or deleted for the new users to keep up with current staffing.
Management of the resources involved in accessing on-line information from vendors can raise additional complications. Certain services may require specialized hardware or licensed software to be used in accessing the information. Additionally, certain dedicated modems or phone lines may have to be provided. When a physical move of a user is planned, decisions on whether to move the hardware and other infrastructure needs to be made. If a new user occupying the seat will require the same resources as were there, then only the changes in the user name are needed. Often, however, physical equipment or software will have to be moved.
The many market data and information services vendors typically invoice for their services on a monthly basis and charge rates that are related to the number of users within the financial service client. Often the rate structures can be a flat monthly fee for a user. Alternatively, a flat fee for the company may be charged (in which case the present system is useful for providing an automated method of posting charge-backs to the department or user), or a fee per request or for line usage time may be used. Finally, tiered pricing schedules and volume or other discounts need to be tracked.
In many of the large financial institutions, a typical vendor's printed invoice may be an inch thick and contain thousands of line items. Since services and entitlements may be charged based on a monthly fee, for example, often when additions or deletions of users are made to an account, such changes appear on the following month invoice as a series of debits and credits. For example, if a bank deletes an entitlement in the middle of March for one user, the monthly invoice for that service will typically include a charge for one month's usage by the user. The remaining days in March not actually used are then credited on the April invoice.
Because of the extensive amount of data required in tracking individual user entitlements and reviewing the hundreds of monthly invoices, typically a financial service company can only conduct a summary review of the invoices. In general, if an invoice remained fairly constant on a month-to-month basis, it is generally paid without any further detailed reconcilement. For an invoice that is more than marginally different from the month-to-month average, a firm can spend up to three to four weeks per month reconciling and charging back these invoices.
In addition to invoice reconcilement and billing, there is a need within the financial institutions for managing the related functions of procurement and contract management for the market data services; hardware and software inventory control, and help desk support; managing moves and changes among users and among user entitlements; and managing internal departmental charge backs where the fees for the market data services are apportioned to the appropriate department or user. In the current state of affairs for typical financial institutions, disparate manual and automated systems are used for one or another of these various functions and often cause duplicate processing and data entry throughout the various responsible areas within the financial institution.
What is desired is a system and method that can track vendors and contract related data, including costs for every type of service provided by the vendors. The system should maintain complete information on market data service contracts, with on-line update of service terms and usage. The system preferably tracks vendors, contracts, products, services, various vendor pricing methodologies, delivery and third-party billing information.
It is also desirable for the system to process and reconcile invoices from the vendors. For example, the system should reconcile vendor invoices against individual usage data. It would be most desirable for the system to receive electronic invoices for direct import into the system from the market information service vendors. The system then automatically calculates costs based on an inventory of actual requests for information, and calculates unit costs for services based on the various vendor pricing methodologies. The system should automate the reconciliation of charges against usage data and provide appropriate charge back reports.
It is desired to provide an internal charge back processing function which can allocate monthly market data costs back to the financial service institution user or department. Unit costs for all services are calculated at various levels and pricing methodologies and include an appropriate allocation for direct usage charges, shared account level charges and company site license type allocations. In the past, this function has been a manually intensive, imprecise and incomplete process.
The system desirably contains a real-time inventory of locations, hardware, software and entitlements for users or employees. Historical usage information should also be maintained by the system to verify new charges and credits with the vendors.
The system should manage help desk functions, such as moving a user or changing a user's entitlements. Preferably, the system can create “tickets” for repairs and work orders covering equipment, market data services, and general hardware or software help. The system should desirably also track calls to a help desk and record completion of help desk requests.
The system should also have the capability of planning and implementing both small and large-scale moves of multiple employees or users, entitlements and equipment from one seat to another. Employees, entitlement and equipment should be able to be moved independently from one another. Once a particular move is planned, the system generates and tracks the individual “tickets
Citibank N.A.
Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel LLP
Meinecke-Díaz Susanna
Stamber Eric W.
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