Trema Seeks Clients among Real Estate Lenders.

Trema, a technology company known for providing automation to international clients as big as the European Central Bank and Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., is now offering its services to users in the U.S. mortgage market.

And Trema's Finance Kit trading system is garnering a growing amount of interest, "especially from some of the mortgage companies," Robert Lopez, director, business development for Trema (Americas) Inc., told this publication in an interview at MSN's offices here.

Finance Kit's strength lies in its ability to give clients the ability to handle a wide range of financial products using a single system, Mr. Lopez said. That may prove attractive to mortgage market participants, he said.

Such a system is likely to be attractive to such clients because many companies are "no longer just looking at their mortgage portfolio," Mr. Lopez said. This has been especially true given "the increase in mortgage rates recently," he said.

"You can't just go out nowadays and say, 'We run a big mortgage book and we're just going to manage the mortgages,'" Mr. Lopez said. "What we're seeing is people starting to cross assets now in order to more effectively manage the risk of that portfolio and different banks have different exposures."

He said that many companies, for example, "have foreign clients, whether they be (corporations) or banks, that they are getting money from and issuing mortgages. (So) they have foreign exchange exposure."

Companies are "really looking to manage their portfolios on a (generally accepted accounting principles) basis," Mr. Lopez said. "So, taking a certain percentage of the portfolio, managing short-term products and ... managing long-term bonds (in another and) things like that ... the only way you can do that is (by using) one integrated system."