JPMorgan makes Smalltalk with development suite

JPMorgan has used an object-oriented development suite to build a new financial risk management and pricing system much faster than it could with other programming languages.

The banking giant used the Smalltalk development suite to develop its 'Kapital' financial risk management and pricing system.

"Smalltalk allowed us to develop Kapital much quicker than other languages would have," said Colin Lewis, vice president of JPMorgan.

"It provides good return on investment and saves costs associated with training and marketing for new products."

JPMorgan had estimated that to build Kapital in another language would have required at least three times the amount of resources to develop and maintain the application.

Lewis added that the Smalltalk part of its systems requires very little modification across differing operating systems - the bank uses Solaris, Windows NT and Linux.

"Portability and stability is a big issue for us," he said in a statement.

Smalltalk, explained its developer Cincom Systems, is based on 'pure' object-oriented techniques, and is easy for developers to use because it requires no in-depth knowledge of programming languages.

According to Cincom, Smalltalk allows businesses to quickly develop and market new products while still giving consideration to the financial 'risk' factors associated with introducing new market products.

"It allows businesses to market new products more quickly and is also scalable," said Tim Matthews, business development executive of Cincom Systems.

Matthews said Smalltalk was developed for a niche market, and that some IT departments were resistant to using it because they are already established users of mainstream programming languages, such as C++.

"Smalltalk's biggest problems are associated with getting IT departments to take it on board because they are often resistant to learning new programming languages," he added.

Smalltalk is provided free of charge for non-commercial download from Cincom's Smalltalk website.