London, UK – March 5th, 2010 – SunGard has launched two new Stream Gateways for the Singapore Exchange Limited (SGX) and the London Stock Exchange (EDX). SunGard’s Stream Gateways are a series of clearing gateways for listed derivatives markets. The new Stream Gateways will help SunGard customers improve clearing performance and efficiency on the SGX and EDX.

SunGard’s Stream Gateways are integrated with its post-trade derivatives processing solutions, including Stream Clearvision, Stream Ubix, Stream GMI and Stream Options Watch, which help customers improve performance and efficiency. Developed in Java and based on industry standards such as FIX messaging, SunGard’s Stream Gateways can be delivered in a number of different technical environments including Windows, UNIX and Linux. Leveraging a scalable architecture, multiple gateways can be installed for a single exchange to help support increased trading volumes.

At present, the EDX gateway has already been selected by eleven of SunGard’s customers and the SGX gateway has gone live with eleven customers.

Yassine Brahim, president of SunGard’s global trading business, said, “SunGard’s customers in the post-trade derivatives environment continue to face challenges in terms of scalability, performance and efficiency. The adoption of our new SGX and EDX Stream Gateways reflects the growing need for improved clearing performance and efficiency in the derivatives space, and mirrors the success of our TOCOM and OCC gateways. Stream Gateways were launched in June 2009 and five are now live for TOCOM, OCC, LME, SGX and EDX.”

About SunGard Global Trading

SunGard’s Global Trading business provides multi-asset, front- to back-office trading solutions for equities, fixed income, derivatives, FX and commodities on exchanges worldwide. These solutions support full lifecycle trading and trade processing activities including information services, market connectivity and order management that help improve trade efficiency and risk monitoring.

About SunGard

SunGard is one of the world’s leading software and IT services companies. SunGard serves more than 25,000 customers in more than 70 countries.

SunGard provides software and processing solutions for financial services, higher education and the public sector. SunGard also provides disaster recovery services, managed IT services, information availability consulting services and business continuity management software.

With annual revenue exceeding $5 billion, SunGard is ranked 435 on the Fortune 500 and is the largest privately held business software and services company on the Forbes list of private businesses. Based on information compiled by Datamonitor*, SunGard is the third largest provider of business applications software after Oracle and SAP. Continuity, Insurance & Risk has recognized SunGard as service provider of the year an unprecedented six times. For more information, please visit SunGard at www.sungard.com.

*January 2009 Technology Vendors Financial Database Tracker http://www.datamonitor.com

Trademark Information: SunGard, the SunGard logo, Stream Clearvision, Stream Ubix, Stream Options Watch and Stream GMI are trademarks or registered trademarks of SunGard Data Systems Inc. or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and other countries. All other trade names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.

London, March 1st, 2010 – SunGard has integrated its smart order routing and algorithmic trading solutions, GL Stream and GL Tactics, with market data feeds from QuantHouse, a leading provider of ultra low latency market data technologies. SunGard customers using the solutions will be able to select data feeds from either SunGard or QuantHouse, according to speed, content, resiliency and stability, helping them to choose the right feed for a specific time and goal. The integration is part of SunGard’s multiple market data vendor strategy, designed to help improve the support for customers in algorithmic trading, high frequency trading or multi-venue environments.

Pierre Feligioni, general manager and co-founder of QuantHouse, said, “The need for fast market data flows has become paramount with the development of algorithmic trading and high frequency trading. Brokers are searching for solutions to improve their market data capture and order routing performance. SunGard’s trading customers will be able to benefit from QuantHouse market data co-location offering to help improve market data capture and SunGard’s smart order routing capacity.”

Yassine Brahim, president of SunGard’s global trading business, said, “Algorithmic trading systems need to process a lot of market data, both in throughput and real-time, to support brokers’ execution strategies. The resiliency of the market data delivery is important to help brokers deploy algorithms. With its algorithmic trading solutions now available on both GL Net and QuantHouse market data feeds, SunGard is helping its customers increase the sourcing, performance and resiliency of their market data feeds.”

About QuantHouse

QuantHouse is an independent global provider of end-to-end systematic trading solutions.

It includes ultra low latency market data technologies, algo-trading development framework, trading infrastructure and order routing service; to help hedge funds, proprietary desks and low latency sensitive sell side firms to take the lead.

QuantHouse products and services offering are composed of:

• QuantFEED, Ultra Low Latency Market Data technologies … to be the first to detect market opportunities,

• QuantFACTORY, the Algo Trading Strategy Development framework … to be the first to launch new trading models,

• QuantLINK, global trading infrastructures …to be the first to match opportunities.

For more information about QuantHouse and its solutions for quant trading firms, please visit: www.quanthouse.com

About GL Stream

The GL Stream suite provides a comprehensive response to the challenges of global electronic trading. GL Stream ASP for Market Access is a fully managed and cost-effective solution for exchange connectivity, based on hosted and mutualized market gateways. GL Stream for Liquidity Management is a suite of capabilities for trading of instruments across multiple competing venues: exchanges, ECNs, MTFs, dark pools and in-house matching engines.

About SunGard

SunGard is one of the world’s leading software and IT services companies. SunGard serves more than 25,000 customers in more than 70 countries.

SunGard provides software and processing solutions for financial services, higher education and the public sector. SunGard also provides disaster recovery services, managed IT services, information availability consulting services and business continuity management software.

With annual revenue exceeding $5 billion, SunGard is ranked 435 on the Fortune 500 and is the largest privately held business software and services company on the Forbes list of private businesses. Based on information compiled by Datamonitor*, SunGard is the third largest provider of business applications software after Oracle and SAP. Continuity, Insurance & Risk has recognized SunGard as service provider of the year an unprecedented six times. For more information, please visit SunGard at www.sungard.com.

*January 2009 Technology Vendors Financial Database Tracker http://www.datamonitor.com

Trademark Information: SunGard, the SunGard logo, GL Stream and GL Tactics are trademarks or registered trademarks of SunGard Data Systems Inc. or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and other countries. All other trade names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.

March, 18th 2010
From 10.00 am to 3.00 pm
SunGard – 42 rue Notre-Dame des Victoires, 75002 Paris

The full program for the day will be announced in the weeks to come.

For more information, please email to: gt-pts@sungard.com

The full program for the event will be announced in the weeks to come.

For more information please contact : citydays@sungard.com

Global brokers need to deliver increasingly sophisticated trading services while controlling their technology costs. Working with global vendors, such as SunGard, can facilitate optimization by integrating tailored solutions to focus on strategic objectives, such as multi-market trading and risk management. At the same time the operation and support of many infrastructure components, such as market connectivity gateways, can be outsourced.

After a decade of unprecedented growth, the exchange-traded derivatives (ETD) industry  was subject to a sharp correction during the global financial crisis. Volatility increased and contract volumes plunged. Now though, the future is already looking much brighter, even if there is, as Kevin White, lead partner for financial services at Ineum Consulting UK, claimed a ‘do more for less’ challenge facing everyone.

White made his assertion while moderating a panel session on ETD post-trade processes. In his opening remarks he stated that many believe the future will see increased growth. White listed some reasons for this, including: an increase in the number of exchanges; 24-hour, round the week trading; higher volumes flowing from algorithmic trading; and the continued switch of over-the-counter (OTC) business securities processes to the central counterparty (CCP) model.

White asked the panel to first state what they regarded as their key operational challenges. Kim Lennen, global head of futures and options post-trade technology at JP Morgan, said it was “keeping the boat afloat while steering ahead” at a time of focus on capacity during an upsurge in volumes while accommodating new controls.

Didier Dos Santos, derivatives business development manager at BNP Paribas Securities Services spoke of the “tremendous switch and increase in emphasis to risk management” and concerns on the matching side, due to the higher level of volatility, and a shift to close-to-real-time matching from overnight. These he said, were producing a “major stress on our systems and people.”

Mark Mills, director of futures and options at Merrill Lynch, echoed this, and noted the enormous upsurge in interest and scrutiny aimed at the ETD market following the 2008 financial crisis.  “Everybody wants your expertise on how exchanges and their margin calls works now”, he claimed.

Patrick Tessier, head of European ETD operations at UBS, said that, “contract volumes may be down, but transaction volumes have not tailed off by as much.” He marvelled at the novelty of being asked to help clients with risk management and straight-through-processing [STP] developments, as they reassessed broker relationships and credit.

White then focussed attention on risk management issues. Tessier began with the perennial problem of brokerage being impacted by volatility, and the industry not being fully geared to intraday settlement, which requires real-time position monitoring.

Intraday margining

Mills added that the frequency of exchange margin calls had risen, and brokers were no longer happy or able to ‘swallow’ these overnight anymore. Instead they want to clear and match margin calls with their clients intraday. Lennen agreed: “The demand now is how fast can you recompute margin and cash exposure intraday…it’s almost moving from a T+1 to T+0 basis, and that’s a challenging environment,” he said. This requires the full end-to-end process, “from execution to books and records”, to be completed in minutes. Dos Santos concurred and added that collecting margin and collateral from clients was a key challenge, but at least do-able because of industry automation.

He added: “Operationally speaking, the biggest area of risk has always been around deliveries and options exercise.” As a result, this had been identified by BNP Paribas Securities Services as a key area for investment as it sought further automation.

Mills picked up on the communication issues involved in this: “STP from client to exchange around expiration is going to be extremely beneficial for us…to mitigate risk issues”. Tessier agreed but mentioned a major stumbling block. “Interaction with exchanges is still often too manual on big expiration dates, when thousands of trades need attention all at the same time,” he pointed out. Add to this the new flex products now cleared through CCPs, and all this puts the human links between clients, brokers and exchange systems under immense pressure, he claimed

Dos Santos said that he could not agree more, and questioned how can you deal effectively and manage the risks with clients that give you manual instructions right up to the time limit for action? It may be fine with one client, but, “how do you deal with it if you have 20 different clients with 20 strategies in the market, and all waiting to process within a minute of the deadlines? At the moment the answer is to throw human resources at it, but that isn’t either efficient or risk-less,” he stressed. His answer is to work with IT vendors and exchanges to prompt fuller automation of the investor side of the business.

White then asked the panel to move on to considering the general outlook in the ETD world now; noting that in 2008 there was a widespread general media and public perception that derivatives were bad and dangerous things.

More products and more regulation

Tessier noted that the steady move from OTC to CCP/exchange models for many derivatives means that there is inevitably more regulatory oversight, which further increases back office workloads. Mills added that since the SocGen rogue trader issue, the amazing Volkswagen stock volatility and the Lehman’s collapse there have been massive additions to workload and pressures to monitor positions and activity. “Data has to be there, correct and timely,” he said.

Mills thought the market had reacted well to the problems, and that the derivatives industry does not get the full credit it deserves for the way it functioned and applied necessary changes. However, Dos Santos partly disagreed: “The Lehman crisis saw the whole market move in 24 to 48 hours, and the [ETD] model already in place was proved to be right.”

The panel finished up considering technology development issues, with first listing known current areas of concern: the effect of new asset classes moving on to exchanges; the surge in volumes; the break up of silos and a move to horizontal operating models. All require infrastructure re-engineering from end to end, said White, but getting funding currently is a massive challenge.

Tessier thought IT vendors are meeting many of these challenges, and added that there was additional regulatory and political pressure on the street-side to move more processes from OTC to more easily monitored exchanges. He also called for a move away from processing futures and swaps separately – as greater inter-operability was required between units to benefit both the clients and brokers treasuries.

The panel was split down the middle on their immediate IT wish list. Mills and Dos Santos wanted more automation of option management systems, whilst Lennen and Tessier both called for extra automation of the intraday process. But Lennen added a telling caution: “No matter what the sell-side houses do, if clients are poorly automated it will still mean problems in managing expiry, margin and risk,” he warned.

So there was much cautious optimism to be drawn from the session. ETD post trade processing teams had faced up to the immediate operational challenges of the 2008 crisis, and according to the panellists, they coped rather well. Intraday processing has developed into a major concern for end-to-end automation and data processing, as has the remaining manual parts of the STP chain and risks around major expiration dates. But with improved automation from clients to exchanges, these are issues the industry is confident it can overcome.

Number of Trades in equity shares (in thousands), by region

The makeable trend of 2009 is the growth of the volume of trades of the Asian Markets, 39% increase in the average monthly volume of trades compared to 2008.

Domestic Market Capitalization

The Domestic Market Capitalization decreased for all the regions in 2009, the highest drop of the average DMC compared to 2008 was at the level of the EMEA (-27%) and Americas (-22%) while Asia-Pacific was less affected (-11%).

Value of Shares Trading

The overall regions average value of shares traded decreased by 28% compared to 2008, this trend is driven by two regions, the Americas (-33%) and the EMEA -MTF Markets included- (-33 %). Exceptionally, the Asia-Pacific valuation of shares increased in 2009 by 12%.

Graphs on traded derivatives

Turnover in Number of Contracts in Millions

The Asian markets kept a positive growth in the turnover of the futures and options contracts during 2009 with 3% increase compared to 2008. North America decreased by 25% and Europe decreased by 17%. The other markets slowed down because of the financial crisis with (-9%) between 2009 and 2008.

Turnover in Notional Principal in Billions of US Dollars

Notional value: The total value of a leveraged position’s assets. This term is commonly used in the options, futures and currency markets because a very small amount of invested money can control a large position (and have a large consequence for the trader).

The North American Markets are the most important in turnover of notional value, but they decreased by 31% between 2009 and 2008. Europe, the second region after the US in derivatives turnover of notional principal, has undergone the same trend and recorded a 21% decrease. For Asia, despite the growing trend in the turnover of the volume of contracts, the notional principal value deteriorated by 27%. For the other markets the decrease between 2009 and 2008 was by 21%.

When the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID) was unleashed by the European Commission back in November 2007, one of its main aims was to increase competition across the European Economic Area financial markets. While there has been a migration of some traditional cash equities business from exchanges to the new multilateral trading facilities (MTFs) as a consequence, there remain a number of separate national clearing houses and settlement depositories across Europe.

Why this is the case was discussed by a panel moderated by Bob Currie, editorial director at Financial Services Research. Industry experts considered what major changes have been seen from a post-trade perspective and the main issues that are arising. They began by considering what and who was driving the movement of liquidity from exchanges to MTFs.

Trevor Gatfield, head of securities operations at Investec, thought this migration was broker-led rather than client driven, as the former were striving to access all pools of liquidity in order to offer best execution. The panel noted one of the unintended consequences is that many clients cannot afford to develop the IT required to connect directly to all the pools of liquidity now. As a result, they need to partner with an IT routing specialist instead, and as Philippe Ruault, head of financial intermediary solutions at BNP Paribas Securities Services, pointed out, over the last two years there have been many new developments to assist connections to MTFs as well as cover new investment products.

Fragmented and shallow, not integrated and liquid

Lauren Vis, managing director at Kas Bank, reminded the audience the Lisbon Summit in 2000 proposed European market efficiencies, calling for financial markets to be deeper and more integrated, and set 2010 as the target to achieve that. Somewhat disappointedly, here we are in 2009, still striving for this goal, with the liquidity pools in Europe, “now more fragmented than ever”.

Though there was not much surprise expressed about this fragmentation, Trevor Spanner chief operating officer at EuroCCP, said he felt the various central counterparties (CCPs) had a clear role to play in reducing back-end clearing costs. Gareth Bevan of SunGard stated his belief that this interim fragmentation will eventually stop and there would be consolidation. But for the moment, the ongoing front office innovations had not abated. Indeed, “the back office needs to enable that [innovation], not stop it,” said Bevan.

Gatfield talked about the small impact MTFs have had on Investec so far. He believes the biggest current impact on costs is the reduced size of trades. “Doing more trades for less value needs increased automation to cover that cost gap,” he pointed out.

Ruault felt that many of the leading counterparties were going global using MTFs. Vis said this would not necessarily continue, as switching flow to an MTF had to be viable on a cost ground. He noted that the clearing and settlement for MTFs is still done by the major central depositories, which presents absolutely no economies of scale for the back office. Vis thought this was a key point, as direct trading costs now represented only about 10% of expenses, whereas margin management, post-trade settlements, regulatory and client reporting accounted for the remaining 90% of the costs.

Spanner thought the developed US model was an interesting comparison: trading activity had shifted to MTFs, but there was still only one CCP, which helps to reduce risks and costs. Vis thought the European post-trade model could benefit from similar competition, but that smart order routing needs to be extended to cover post-trade work. As the exchanges are unlikely to develop such links themselves,Vis believes it is still up to the exchanges to open up their IT connections to competent technology providers.

The interoperability dream

This led the discussion into the desire for interoperability. Ruault mentioned that a code of conduct for CCP interoperability is in place, but he questioned whether CCPs would really work together for the benefit of their clients. Gatfield felt that more competition between CCPs had perversely introduced more cost for the clients and brokers: even though trade unit costs are down, connectivity costs had gone up. Spanner thought some European CCPs were in favour of interoperability, and it could break through the barriers to access currently ‘closed shop’ markets as such as France and Germany. But he went on to caution that not all CCPs were keen to foster interoperations. For instance, he claimed, LCH.Clearnet would be ‘mad’ to embrace interoperability, because it charges about five times the rates of its European equivalents.

Vis picked up on this theme. In Europe, “there are still seven exchanges and seven CCPs now …if CCPs embrace interoperability, some of them will lose their business,” he stated.

A question from the floor was asked whether the European Central Bank’s (ECB) Target 2-Securities (T2S) initiative would influence the CCP landscape at all. Ruault answered with a flat no, as T2S is aimed at simplifying European settlements rather than clearing. But Spanner felt that directly navigating the 15 European markets was already very difficult and required an effective “agent bank” model – whereas T2S will promote direct access, and increasing investment opportunities. He did, however, acknowledge this was a ECB project in development with a future timeline for completion – maybe 2012 – with no certainty of adoption, rather than currently available. Vis also expressed some scepticism, saying he believed that T2S is a complex and expensive answer to cross-border settlement costs. He thinks it could only work under the auspices of a pan-European securities law that would allow securities firms to continue to legally reside in their home territory.

Change is not cheap

Currie rounded off the session by asking the panel their primary desires for immediate future clearing and settlement developments. Ruault requested more CCP interoperability, and clearer rules for firms to act as CCPs across Europe. Vis wanted to see the exchanges open up to multiple CCPs first, and also for margin processing to be standardised between the CCPs to avoid the current arbitrage possibilities.

Spanner thought that the high back office costs had now been fully exposed by lowering trading costs, with particularly more attention on clearing and settlement costs – and that true competition between the exchanges and CCPs was required to drive these costs down. Bevan said that, from a technology perspective, it was crucial to design systems that have the agility to accept market developments built in, and provide good operations accounting functions.

Finally, Gatfield cautioned that any major developments cost money – and questioned whether the many mooted changes would actually benefit clients, who would effectively have to foot the bill. However, he agreed that there is currently a window of opportunity to make major changes in the European securities back office landscape, before the markets get back to normal levels of business.

London, January 12th, 2010 – SunGard has launched a new clearing gateway for the London Metal Exchange (LME). The new smart gateway, which is developed in Java and based on industry standards such as FIX messaging, will help SunGard customers to improve clearing performance and efficiency on the LME.

The LME smart gateway is the latest in a series of new clearing gateways developed by SunGard for listed derivatives markets. The gateways are integrated with SunGard’s post-trade derivatives solutions, including Stream Clearvision, Stream Ubix and Stream GMI, and can be rolled out in a number of different technical environments including Windows, UNIX and Linux. To date, 15 customers are already using the LME smart gateway.

Yassine Brahim, president of SunGard’s global trading business, said, “The fact that we already have 15 SunGard customers using the LME smart gateway demonstrates that scalability and performance have become key concerns in the post-trade environment. We believe the demand for better post-trade efficiency will continue to increase in 2010 and are anticipating similar enthusiasm in other regions for further smart gateways.”

About SunGard
SunGard is one of the world’s leading software and IT services companies. SunGard serves more than 25,000 customers in more than 70 countries.

SunGard provides software and processing solutions for financial services, higher education and the public sector. SunGard also provides disaster recovery services, managed IT services, information availability consulting services and business continuity management software.

With annual revenue exceeding $5 billion, SunGard is ranked 435 on the Fortune 500 and is the largest privately held business software and services company on the Forbes list of private businesses. Based on information compiled by Datamonitor*, SunGard is the third largest provider of business applications software after Oracle and SAP. Continuity, Insurance & Risk has recognized SunGard as service provider of the year an unprecedented six times. For more information, please visit SunGard at www.sungard.com.

*January 2009 Technology Vendors Financial Database Tracker http://www.datamonitor.com

Trademark Information: SunGard, the SunGard logo, Stream Clearvision, Stream Ubix and Stream GMI are trademarks or registered trademarks of SunGard Data Systems Inc. or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and other countries. All other trade names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.

London, January 4th, 2009 - SunGard has deployed new ultra-low latency market data distribution (MDD) servers for GL Net, its market data and order routing network. GL Net customers will now be able to access highly scalable and enriched market data flows delivered at a microsecond level. The new servers will help customers to take advantage of new trading opportunities in a fragmented multi-venue environment by delivering enriched, real-time market data to their automated trading systems.

SunGard’s new MDD servers can significantly increase market data throughput compared with previous versions, and achieve ultra-low latency down to the microsecond level. They are also highly scalable for management of volume spikes in turbulent market conditions. The new servers will gradually roll out through 2010, replacing all of SunGard’s existing market data servers, and helping to deliver increased performance and capacity to SunGard’s market data customers.

Yassine Brahim, president of SunGard’s global trading business, commented: “A consequence of the fragmentation of liquidity in the U.S. and Europe has been that market data volumes have increased sharply. SunGard’s customers need not only smart order routers and automated trading systems, but also market data distribution servers able to operate with ultra-low latency. SunGard is committed to developing and deploying servers offering microsecond latency.”

About SunGard’s GL Net

GL Net is a high-bandwidth global network, providing order routing and market data delivery services. GL Net links a direct-market-access community of financial institutions, with brokerage organizations offering services for trading on the world’s electronic markets in all core asset classes. GL Net’s connectivity hubs support low-latency market data delivery from global markets and is continuing to expand to cover emerging electronic markets.

About SunGard

SunGard is one of the world’s leading software and IT services companies. SunGard serves more than 25,000 customers in more than 70 countries.

SunGard provides software and processing solutions for financial services, higher education and the public sector. SunGard also provides disaster recovery services, managed IT services, information availability consulting services and business continuity management software.

With annual revenue exceeding $5 billion, SunGard is ranked 435 on the Fortune 500 and is the largest privately held business software and services company on the Forbes list of private businesses. Based on information compiled by Datamonitor*, SunGard is the third largest provider of business applications software after Oracle and SAP. Continuity, Insurance & Risk has recognized SunGard as service provider of the year an unprecedented six times. For more information, please visit SunGard at www.sungard.com.

*January 2009 Technology Vendors Financial Database Tracker http://www.datamonitor.com

Trademark Information: SunGard, the SunGard logo and GL Net are trademarks or registered trademarks of SunGard Data Systems Inc. or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and other countries. All other trade names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.