FOX Translator
No data currently available.
No data currently available.
It's time to let you in on a dirty little secret: You may not own the stock you own. That's right, if you invest with a brokerage firm, the shares you bought are almost certainly not held in your name. Technically, they're held in the name of the Wall Street firm you do business with, hence the term "street name."
No, you haven't been robbed. Ultimately, the decision to hold shares on the books under a different name doesn't affect the economic ramifications for you. You¿re listed as the "beneficial owner," even though the firm is the official owner of the shares. But, you are giving up some rights, and investors concerned about good corporate governance might want to get that stock back in their own names.
Here's the problem: If your stock is technically owned by, say, Merrill Lynch, then Merrill Lynch gets to do things with it that might work against your wishes. Take short selling. Investors who want to sell shares short need to first borrow those shares. The lenders are often the big Wall Street firms that are handing out Street-name shares. So, if you feel that a company you own is a victim of aggressive short selling, chances are your own shares are being used to fuel the shorting.
Also, your brokerage firm can cast ballots on some corporate matters affecting a company without getting your input. Technically, this can only happen in votes considered ¿routine¿ by securities regulators. But, there's a big catch: some big events, like board elections, are considered "routine" under law.
The good news is that you can easily fix the Street name problem: Just request that your brokerage firm makes you the listed owner of the shares. If they refuse, find a new firm.
Home / Markets / Industries / Media
Friday, July 25, 2008
Harte-Hanks Trillium Software Selected by National Health Service to Aid Commissioning in London
Comtex
ALDERMASTON, UK, Jul 25, 2008 (MARKET WIRE via COMTEX) ----Trillium Software(R), a business of Harte-Hanks, Inc. (NYSE: HHS) and a leading enabler of Total Data Quality(TM) solutions, today announced the Commissioning Support Service (CSS) in the United Kingdom as a new customer. CSS is a National Health Service (NHS) public sector healthcare organisation that works with Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) across London to improve patient care through the effective selection and management of healthcare services.
CSS will implement the Trillium Software System(R) to determine the quality of London region patient, clinical and service data that the NHS collects from health provisioning services. CSS uses the data to provide intelligence to Commissioners across thirty of London's PCTs to support their data management, demand forecasting and healthcare planning and purchasing activities. Ensuring valid and high quality data for business intelligence is a major CSS objective.
"Each week we receive over one million data records from the NHS system, sourced from multiple parties in the London region, such as PCTs and their acute and primary care providers," said Husna Naujeer, Communications Manager at CSS. "We needed a solution that would help to automate much of the data validation and ensure a fast response from our services."
She continued: "The Trillium Software System will help us to identify data records that fail to comply with our standards -- so that we can rectify them and continue to provide reliable intelligence to healthcare commissioners towards continuous improvements in patient care."
CSS will use the Trillium Software System to profile and validate the data being loaded into the central NHS SUS (Secondary Uses Service), a single, secure data environment for the NHS Connecting for Health programme. It will also use the software to monitor data quality trends and metrics against defined standards and thresholds. CSS evaluated several data quality products from a number of vendors. The Trillium Software System was selected for its ability to support large and variable data volumes, its automated functionality for discovering data quality problems, and for its support for user-defined business and data validation rules, specific to the needs of CSS.
"Public sector information management initiatives are often made extremely complex by virtue of the many different systems and the high volumes, varying formats, standards and quality of data encountered," said Ed Wrazen, vice president, product management & strategy at Harte-Hanks Trillium Software. "We are pleased to welcome CSS as a customer and as an organisation that understands the fundamental connection between quality data, reliable business intelligence and good planning."
CSS licenced the Trillium Software System via Trustmarque Solutions, a Trillium Software reseller.
About CSS
CSS was established in June 2006 to improve patient care by developing the quality of healthcare commissioning. The organisation provides resources, tools and support to those responsible for commissioning healthcare services in PCTs in London. Visit http://www.css.nhs.uk/ or call 020 7763 6500.
About Trustmarque
Established in 1987, Trustmarque Solutions is one of the largest software licensing companies in the UK. A specialist software licensing consultancy, Trustmarque provides expert advice to all kinds of organisations to help its customers buy the right licences for their business in the most cost efficient way.
About Harte-Hanks
Harte-Hanks is a worldwide direct and targeted marketing company that provides marketing services and shopper advertising opportunities to local, regional, national and international consumer and business-to-business marketers. Visit the Harte-Hanks Web site at http://www.harte-hanks.com or call (800) 456-9748.
Harte-Hanks Trillium Software enables organisations to achieve Total Data Quality by providing a full complement of technologies and services providing global data profiling, data cleansing, enhancement, and data linking for e-business, customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, supply chain management, data warehouse, and other enterprise applications. For more information about Trillium Software and its offerings, call (978) 436-8900 in the United States and in the United Kingdom call +44 (0) 118 940 7666, or visit Trillium Software online at http://www.trilliumsoftware.com.
This document may contain trademarks that are owned or licensed by Harte-Hanks, Inc. and its subsidiaries, including, without limitation, Harte-Hanks, Trillium Software, Trillium Software System, Total Data Quality and other names and marks. All other brand names, product names, or trademarks belong to their respective holders.
[Editor's Note: British English and spellings are used in this press release.]
Media Contacts: UK and Europe: Derek Harris Harris Communications + 44 (0) 1395 516 613 derek@harriscomms.com USA: Michael Antonellis Harte-Hanks Trillium Software (978) 439-3813 michael_antonellis@trilliumsoftware.com
SOURCE: Trillium Software
mailto:derek@harriscomms.com mailto:michael_antonellis@trilliumsoftware.com
Copyright 2008 Market Wire, All rights reserved. ********************************************************************** As of Monday, 07-21-2008 23:59, the latest Comtex SmarTrend� Alert, an automated pattern recognition system, indicated a DOWNTREND on 03-07-2008 for HHS @ $15.78. For more information on SmarTrend, contact your market data provider or go to www.mysmartrend.com SmarTrend is a registered trademark of Comtex News Network, Inc. Copyright � 2004-2008 Comtex News Network, Inc. All rights reserved.
Market Snapshot
| Symbol | Last Price | Netchange | Volume |
|---|---|---|---|
| -- | -- | -- | -- |
| -- | -- | -- | -- |
| -- | -- | -- | -- |
| -- | -- | -- | -- |
| -- | -- | -- | -- |
