Though Burned by GSTPA, SIA is Still a Fan of Matching

T+1 and the GSTPA may both be out of the picture, but that doesn't mean the Securities Industry Association is down on central matching.

At the SIA's Operations Conference and Exhibit, held recently in Boca Raton, Fla., Don Kittell, SIA executive vice president, discusses the association's now-defunct T+1 plans (which will be dusted off in 2004 for re-examination).

Referring to the long-debated T+1 business case, he says, "The history of the business case is a rough one" because it was conceived at the peak of the economic bubble and slated for implementation when the financial markets were in dire straights.

The T+1 plan, he says, came under attack "internally. This is basically where we shot ourselves in the foot as an industry."

Kittell says among the reasons T+1 failed were insufficient buy-in from the buy side, especially small to mid-sized investment managers and the disaster that was GSTPA, partially due to the fact that it's model did not match the ITPC vision making interoperability with Omgeo a difficult proposition.

"We brought Omgeo in at one meeting and GSTPA at another but we were unsuccessful in arriving at an accommodation between the two groups," he says. "No one wants to go through the GSTPA experience again," he says.

However, he says the concept of GSTPA was a good one. "All issues the GSTPA was formed to fix are still there. The only thing that isn't there is GSTPA."

Kittell says he still expects the Securities and Exchange Commission to offer a concept release on the industry moving to STP, which had been expected last year. He describes the new vision of STP as, "A portfolio of system projects, each of which stands or fails on its own merits."

Still a fan of matching, Kittell says that the SIA is now looking to Omgeo. "Omgeo, we're routing for. I can tell you because we have a lot riding on Omgeo."