Metaficient™ MetaBooks™ lets business experts create and maintain their own financial applications, whether in the cloud, on the internet, or on an intranet. MetaBooks™ is currently targeted towards the finance industry, and is ideal for building systems for banks, brokers, funds, family offices, fund administrators or accounting firms. A MetaBooks™ application is organized around a set of entities, books and transactions. BE's can add entities, books and transactions and define how transactions update books. For example, MetaBooks™ has been used by BE's to generate a multi-currency Portfolio Management/Shadow Back Office system named Prime for a small to medium sized hedge fund, fund administrator or accounting firm (see the description on www.Metaficient.com). Prime has a dozen books, including ones for inventory, pricing, accounting, and reconciliation. Adding an investor book did not require changing any of the existing books, structures or functions.
MetaBooks™ can help reduce the cost of integration and upgrade. On the one hand, it makes it easy to connect to existing systems, with powerful tools for importing and exporting data. On the other hand, it provides a single modeling platform that can be extended with new books and transactions. This can greatly reduce the cost of developing and maintaining systems. Similar platforms for other industries have saved 70 to 80% of the traditional costs associated with software construction and maintenance. We expect similar results for our partners and clients.
MetaBooks™ makes IT software less expensive, easier to customize, and more predictable because it separates the business-specific parts of a system from the business-independent parts, and specifies the business-specific parts in a way that BE's can understand and control. A BE can tune the system to fit the exact needs of the business, and can add new types of securities or new lines of business. This framework is fundamentally different from a 3GL, 4GL or 5GL, which focus on making programmers more productive. MetaBooks™ instead attacks one of the biggest problems in IT systems, which is that the BE's do not understand programming and the programmers do not understand the business. So, nobody can be sure that the IT system does what the business needs, and changing the system is prohibitively expensive. With Metaficient™ MetaBooks™, the people who know what the system should do can make sure it does it.
Specifying business rules in MetaBooks™ requires a level of technical understanding similar to that needed to develop large spreadsheets. It is “Lite” programming designed for BE's, sometimes called a “domain specific language” or a system for “end-user programming”. However, most BE's who learn it will say: “Isn’t it amazing what we can do without programming?”
