Plaid Brothers Software announced that Robert W. Baird & Co. is the first brokerage firm to use WebPlaid, the
browser-based version of its enterprise-wide contact and portfolio
management software for the retail brokerage industry.
Baird is deploying the system, which carries information about client positions, balances and costs,
to 650 investment officers and branch managers in 78 branches in 13 states.
“We selected Plaid’s browser-based product both because of its ability to interface
with our back office information system and because it fit in with our
technology strategy of maintaining our data on centralized servers and using a
Web browser as a front end,” said Jimmy Powell, managing director and director of IT at Baird. “We wanted all the ease-of- management benefits
we have with BairdWeb, our intranet system. We weren’t interested in having
software sitting on client PCs.”
WebPlaid is very like the Windows version of the Plaid product, but has the
advantage of simple deployment on an intranet or the Internet, together with
easy maintenance. It includes the same feature of instant data updates across
the enterprise and can receive daily downloads of each day’s trades and
positions directly from all the major back office vendors–such as ADP, Beta,
SIS, National Financial, Phase3 and proprietary systems.
WebPlaid runs on Windows 95 and NT, with Microsoft Internet Explorer or
Netscape Navigator.
