TTW PROFILE

Straight through processing of information from trading partners into the trading room and from there to the back office. There are two primary drivers of this trend. First, the pressure to go from T+5 to T+1, and maybe T+0, is the result of the need for reduced settlement and operational risk, which ties up significant amounts of capital and resources.

Second, the increasing margin pressure in the securities industry is driving the need to become more efficient.

A recently formed product group at Reuters, Securities Transactions Services, is going to hold a briefing at SIA previewing its first product suite, Intertrade Direct (see story, this issue). The suite will offer global, integrated solutions for order routing between professional buyside and sellside securities professionals. Intertrade Direct supports the entire order processing chain, including pre-trade and post-trade activities. Intertrade Direct was recently acquired when Reuters purchased Liberty in September of last year. We will demonstrate the product's integration with our new flagship 3000Xtra information product. We are also unveiling the first component of the suite, Orders Direct.

We are working to enable our desktop risk management product (Kondor +) to facilitate straight through processing (STP) by linking it to the Intertrade Direct order routing software. This enhancement will allow orders to be processed electronically, preparing an electronic ticket for settlement in the back office. This will free up traders from time-consuming paperwork, streamline mid- and back-office operations and enhance accuracy.

Millennium compliance has been much discussed and planned for, but this issue is still the biggest challenge in the coming year. Reuters is perceived by its customers to be trusted to perform well during the Y2K transition. Reuters is sharing as much information as possible with our clients and other groups on the street. We have been a proactive participant in the ongoing streetwide millennium tests. For those customers who want to add redundancy of market data providers as part of their millennium contingency plans, Reuters is offering a short-term, easily implemented backup based upon Reuters Mobile.

Leveraging emerging standards to integrate applications at the desktop. We are already at the forefront of this trend, and we will continue to do that. Reuters is concentrating on building business objects that can be linked together within containers such as the Reuters Kobra data display application. These business objects could be information, order routing or transaction objects as well as information and graphics objects. Reuters has always embraced open technical standards, and our goal is to offer clients one desktop environment that will allow them to integrate all the types of data and information they need to do their jobs well.

There are still too many terminal applications on the trading floors, which do not allow IT managers to leverage emerging standards to enable better integration. This reduces the opportunities for the streamlining of installation and support. Reuters has been pushing aggressively with our open products and platforms, to allow more flexibility on the trading floor. The goal should be to allow the customer to combine best-of-breed news, data and software together with their own proprietary information. Our customers will benefit from lower cost of ownership as a result, so Reuters will be pushing hard in this direction.

Administration of data usage and permissioning in an open environment. As market volumes continue to increase and as the number of individuals across the enterprise who want market data increases, the complexity of control and compliance increases. With our Data Access Controls (DACs) product, Reuters has the market leading application in this area, but we need to keep investing in this area to keep up with market demands.