Stanchart's Intranet-Based FX Platform Gets An Official Kick-Off In Singapore

SINGAPORE--As expected, the Standard Chartered Bank branch in Singapore, using Tibco's TIBMercury platform, has implemented foreign exchange and money markets trading over the bank's intranet for its corporate customers.

The On-line Treasury application, provided free to Stanchart customers, is written in Java and launched via a Web browser. The bank has also backed up the system with an Informix database and a Sun Microsystems server. Stanchart customers can run the application from desktops running either Microsoft's Windows 95 or Windows NT. Stanchart also distributes proprietary research and product information to On-line Treasury users, says a Stanchart official.

On-line Treasury is targeted to handle high-volume transactions that have a low-dollar value. Many of these kinds of transactions are done using vanilla FX and money market instruments, says the bank official. The system also handles FX spot, swap, forward and time option instruments.

The system enables customers to extend a maturing transaction or have an early take-up of a forward transaction. In three seconds, a live price can be quoted for more than 700 currency pairs; transactions can be executed in less than 30 seconds. The bank plans to have about 50 to 75 customers using On-line Treasury by the end of 1999.

Singapore was chosen as the first site for On-line Treasury because of its roles as a financial hub and as an operational centre for global businesses, says Lee Boon Huat, regional treasurer for Southeast Asia at Stanchart. The system was originally developed jointly in Singapore by bank and Tibco staffs in a project that spanned some 15 months; Stanchart officials only recently announced that the platform went into production late last year (TTW, January 19, 1998). This implementation is among the first of its kind in Asia/Pacific.

The bank developed the On-line Treasury application to ease the pressure on its staff in managing the bank's customers. By automating the low value-added types of transactions, the bank expects its trading room staff to have more time to develop new and current customer relationships, says the bank official.

TIBMercury provides tighter integration with the bank's overall P/L and risk systems, and links to automatic and manual execution systems, says a Tibco official. All the events of a trade's life-cycle are managed in real time and can be integrated with the bank's business applications servers, corporate databases or other legacy systems.

TIBMercury will help the bank achieve economies of scale in trade execution across financial markets and geographies, improve internal information flows and enhance customer service, says a Tibco official.

A source close to Stanchart told TTW last year that Tibco was selected over automated trading system rival Cognotec, which is based in Dublin. Cognotec has a number of clients for its FX corporate trading system, called Autodealing, including Bank of America, NatWest Markets and the former Swiss Bank Corp. (now owned by UBS).

Stanchart has used Tibco products for other projects, including its Cerberus global IT treasury infrastructure effort that links all of the bank's treasury applications. Cerberus, which has been live in Singapore for over a year now (TTW, May 25, 1998), involves Sun Microsystems servers, an Informix database and messaging middleware from Tibco, as well as server and browser software from Netscape Communications (TTW, February 23, 1998).