ELECTRONIC TRADING

In a move to create a tighter, more liquid and competitive market, BrokerTec Futures Exchange (BTEX), a fully electronic fixed-income futures exchange, said it will decrease the minimum tick size on the five-year Treasury note contract as of Friday, Feb. 13, 2003. The minimum tick size will be reduced from 1/2 of 1/32nd of a point of (US$ 15.625 rounded up to the nearest one-cent per contract) to 1/4 of 1/32nd of a point (or US$ 7.813 rounded to the nearest 1 cent per contract). Observing a growth in open interest and an increase in participation from the institutional trading community, BTEX reported that a total of 2.1 million contracts were traded in 2002, its first full year of operation.

Royal Bank of Scotland, Financial Markets (RBS) picked Calypso Technology on which to process its capital markets operations globally. RBS will use Calypso's "out of the box, core functionality" to develop functionality using a toolkit, states David Hefford, Global Head of Risk and Operations Technology at RBS Financial Markets in a news release. Plans are to go live with an initial project in the second half of 2003. Calypso will ultimately process the full range of capital markets products that RBS/FM trades, ranging from Gilts and Euro-government bonds to high-yield.

TradeWeb, an online-bond-trading platform, launched AccountNet, a real-time standing settlement instructions database and Web-based network that allows institutions, securities dealers and custodian banks to warehouse and share settlement instructions for client accounts. The system is designed to reduce processing costs, fail rates and settlement delays caused by inaccurate entry of settlement instructions.

The launch follows a successful six-month live-test of the system by ten leading primary dealers, five major investment managers and two top global custodian banks. The chief competitor is Omgeo Alert/SID. AccountNet is free-of-charge for all customers in 2003.