The Joint Venture

The 4xtra Alliance is a Joint Venture between several UK based companies. The oldest member of the Joint Venture was founded in 1981 as a consultancy based in the City of London and offering bespoke systems development and financial modelling to the Financial Markets, Insurance and Management Information arena.

In 1986 we began a long involvement with Midland bank (now part of HSBC), first modelling financial instruments and then developing 4xtra as a foreign exchange dealing system. The development of this product continued for other clients adding the capability to process Loans and deposit, FRAs, Futures, etc.

The consultancy side continued to evolve, moving towards Internet solutions and enhancing our own in-house methodology until several of our member organisations became full members of the DSDM Consortium. Since that time we have worked to maintain the compatibility of our approach with the DSDM framework. We feel that DSDM has grown beyond its beginnings as an Agile methodology and therefore we terminated our memberships of the consortium .We have continued to absorb ideas from eXtreme Programming and other Agile approaches.

The constituent members of venture pursued independent, but interwoven paths over all this period, regulated by a series of separate agreements. In early 2000, after successful cooperation on a number of Y2K projects, the Joint Venture was formally constituted.

Its aim is to utilise the complementary talents of the member organizations to further develop an integrated series of products and services, based on our long history of collaboration and the wide range of existing application packages and services, together with new Internet based offerings.

Our Goal...

is to build long term partnerships with our client base as we believe the "after care" relationship is as significant as the initial choice of the system. Our relationships do not end with the delivery of a solution but continue with development and support of the systems to the direct benefit of clients.

Our approach is to implement solutions that have a minimum impact on business practice, but which can be swiftly tailored to respond to the inevitable changes in changes in business activity and market climates.

4XTRA - proven track record

A sample of clients, past and present:

Financial

• County Investment Management
• First National Bank of Chicago
• Hungarian International Bank
• Mercantile Credit
• Midland Bank / HSBC
• Nordea
• Swiss Bank
• TSB Trust

Education

• CfBT Educational Trust
• The ChildcareCompany
• Verhoef in Europe Software Training

Large Companies

• British Airways
• British Petroleum
• British United Provident Association
• Gallaher
• Reuters
• S&W Berisfords
• Rank Xerox
• Tesco
• Wellcome Foundation

Other Software Developers

• Optima Systems
• Dyalog
• The Carlisle Group

And many varied organisations such as

• Clarity Resourcing - Employment agency
• Naked Leader - Management Consultancy
• Pb Roofing - speciality Lead and zinc roofing company
• Heathrow Horseboxes - automotive and coach-building company
• Lyneview Farm - horse breeders and remedial training stables
• The Complete Gardener - Garden, Landscape and Groundwork Services
• SR Group - solar energy systems providers
• Super 12 Soccer - Systems Analysis Trading

These are not all current clients and for several some or even one member organization within 4xtra has performed (or is performing) the work.

Our Development team

Small and highly specialised focused on developing the right solution for the customer

• 6 full time developers with further associated consultants
• 185 years commercial programming experience
• 114 years combined experience in financial trading systems market

We have a history of strong customer service orientation. Many other organizations are involved in various roles, for example Richard C. Hames provides systems support and participates in the SchoolEmail project.