Wilco Launches Corporate Actions

Wilco is following through with announcements made at last year's SIBOS show that it would develop a new "high volume architecture" for securities processing, says Mike West, head of marketing at Wilco. The first deliverable on this new architecture, a corporate actions module, will be presented at the show. Although it is only an internal project name at this point, the new architecture itself is being called UPM-Universal Processing Manager. The Java-based UPM architecture utilizes XML messaging and will be able to process "substantially higher volumes," says West.

While the UPM is platform independent, West notes that benchmark testing on a Sun Microsystems platform has reached processing speeds of over 2 million trades per hour. The corporate actions functionality for the UPM architecture is the first in a series of business functionalities to be released on a modular basis in the future. West says that a "tier one international investment firm," is the first client to use the corporate actions module. The module is available for the UPM platform and is also interoperable with Wilco's current Gloss system.

In addition to the corporate actions module to be presented at SIBOS, Wilco will also be introducing an adapter for trade settlement and matching in the Japanese markets. The JASDEC Adapter facilitates automated trade and settlement matching as a real-time interface between client-settlement systems and the Japan Securities Depository Center's (JASDEC) Pre-Settlement Matching System (PSMS). Based on the ISO 15022 message standard and via the TCP-IP protocol, the JASDEC Adapter allows two-way messaging between a firm's host systems and the JASDEC PSMS. The initial phase of this project covers Japanese domestic equities trading while the next development phase will automate trade and settlement matching for convertible bond trading and is expected to go live in the first quarter of next year.

In other Wilco news, SG Securities in London, the corporate and investment banking business of the Socitete Generale Group, recently went live with Wilco's Gloss securities-processing system. The Gloss system was initially implemented into the SG Securities London office for straight-through processing of international equity trades, for both principal trades and agency trades executed on behalf of SG Securities clients. Wilco's STP Explorer real-time exception-management system was also implemented to control STP flow and minimize operational risk. SG Securities is also implementing the Gloss Corporate Actions system and the Wilco Print Adapter for automating the production of printed client communication and for telex and fax communications. The initial implementation spanned seven months, with the next implementation phases covering UK agency and UK principal for equities to be complete by June 2002.