01 June 2006
 

Tokyo - SwapsWire announced today the launch of its Japanese OTC Equity Options service. From July, four dealers and four inter-dealer brokers will use it to electronically confirm their trades. A handful of dealers are already teed up to go live soon after. This is the first time any service of this kind has been offered to the Japanese equities market.

SwapsWire captures, verifies and confirms deals on-screen within minutes of execution, removing the need for manual processing of paper contracts. As well as the reduction in processing cost, confirmation on trade date (T+0) means a significant reduction in operational risk. SwapsWire is already used by dealers, inter-dealer brokers and buy-side clients in Europe, the U.S.A. and Asia for other OTC derivative products including interest rate and credit derivatives.

The system supports new trade and trade-life cycle events including amendments, increases and decreases, terminations, exercises, assignments and corporate actions.

Olaf Kasten, BNP Paribas’ Head of Trading, Equities and Derivatives Japan, said, “BNP Paribas has been an active participant in the development of the SwapsWire service for Equity Options. We use the system extensively for our European OTC equity business and have realised significant operational efficiencies and virtually eliminated confirmation risk. We are happy to now be able to start using the system in Japan.”

“We like the fact that all parties to the trade - the inter-dealer broker and both traders - will confirm the trade details from a single record within minutes of execution and that the broker confirmation, the trader's confirmation and our own trade capture can be achieved with a single click”, he continued.

Masato Kawamura, President, Central Tanshi Securities Co., Ltd., said, “We are pleased to be participating in this new initiative because we think it will revolutionize the market. The introduction of an online confirmation service will reduce the human errors tremendously, and especially in the growing OTC equity market, it will help us to be more efficient in providing services to our clients”.

Chip Carver, SwapsWire’s CEO, said, “Japan has always been an important strategic market for us. We are delighted that we have eight market leaders ready to go live with this service. It validates our business plan and proves the solid nature of our product. Our Interest Rate Service has been well received and we expect the business to also grow rapidly in the equity market judging from the number of early takeups of the service. We will continue to build on our success here by expanding both our presence and the services we offer.”

About SwapsWire

Since 2002, the SwapsWire system has been automating legal confirmation, trade capture, and broker confirmation for multiple OTC derivatives products including interest rate swaps, forward rate agreements, overnight index swaps, caps, floors, swaptions, credit default swaps, equity options and variance swaps. Today hundreds of sell-side, buy-side, and inter-dealer broker sites in Europe, Asia and the USA use the system.

SwapsWire supports trade workflow of all types, with integrated trade-date legal confirmation, avoiding the traditional need to separate trade-date workflow/checkout from legal confirmation. Workflows supported include:
- Inter-dealer broker STP and confirmation
- Trade Capture
- Legal confirmation
- Prime Brokerage (Give-Up)
- Amendments, terminations, option exercise, corporate actions
- Allocations
- Novations

SwapsWire is owned by a consortium of 21 leading derivatives dealers: Bank of America, The Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ Ltd., Barclays Bank, Bayerische Hypo-und Vereinsbank, BNP Paribas, Calyon, Citigroup, IXIS Corporate and Investment Bank, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, HSBC Bank Plc, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Mizuho Capital Markets, Morgan Stanley, The Royal Bank of Scotland, Societe Generale, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, and UBS Investment Bank. For more information on SwapsWire, visit www.swapswire.com

Media Contacts:
SwapsWire Henry Hunter +44 (0)20 7071 0119
Amy Mihalakis 07970 050 828
Kimihiko Matsuno +81 3 4360 8368

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