Letters

Disaster Recovery: Are We Prepared?
I'd like to comment on your article as to whether progress is being made with Wall Street disaster recovery. As one of the many companies that was greatly affected last September, in terms of loss of facilities and technology (though fortunate in that we only lost one employee), Lehman Brothers has put a tremendous amount of focus on business-continuity planning, far in excess of anything we had ever done in the past. This includes having always at the ready, redundant-trading facilities in a backup location, far more resilient telephony (including redunant-direct lines to customers from our backup-trading site), and actual disaster-scenario drills to test our plans, to mention a few. While none of this is free, our feeling is that it is necessary and, in fact, relatively cheap insurance, given the post Sept. 11 realities of operating our business. These views are clearly influenced by having lost our main headquarters, all of our N.Y. trading rooms, and a data center. For us to not prepare for another, even worse case scenario, would show that we learned nothing.

Jonathan Beyman
Chief Information Officer
Lehman Brothers

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Clear Demonstration of the Continued "Cheapness" of the Buy Side
As a consultant, it is our opinion and continued advice to custodians and prime brokers that they preserve the integrity of the margins by curtailing the amount "free" tech they dole out to their buy-side clients.

I have a question, when will the buy side begin to assume more responsibility for there own record keeping and reporting requirements?

Regards,
Brian Shapiro
Presdient
CarbonBased Consulting, Inc.

To view this article, visit www.wallstreetandtech.com/story/WST20020905S0007