Euroclear plans business contingency revamp
Settlement system Euroclear plans to implement a new business
continuity programme built on a framework of three data centres to
store and process transactions. Euroclear maintains that the
arrangements will enable each of its entities to resume their technical
operations within one hour of a local disaster, such as a fire or a
bomb, or within three hours of a major regional disaster that disables
both primary data centres. It will also be able to work in its new
business contingency environment for up to two years.
The three data centres will each have the processing and storage
capacity to process the entire Euroclear group’s transaction volumes.
Real-time data replications and load balancing will ensure full
synchronisation of transaction processing between the two ‘live’
primary data centres, in France, at all times. The third centre, run
from the existing data centre in Belgium, will replicate data.
Euroclear says it will also spread the business expertise of critical
functions across several distant office locations to avoid the risk
that they could all be hit by a single local disaster.
State Street boosts data management
State Street has allied with software provider DST International
(DSTi) to integrate the latter’s HiDataWarehouse and HiInvest products
into State Street’s existing data warehouse services.
The partners say that, combined, the new framework will enable clients
to pull together data from multiple internal and external sources,
including custodians, third-party administrators and data vendors, to
form a single consolidated hub of investment data across their
organisations.
Joe Antonellis, State Street’s chief information officer, says: “Our
data warehouse offering enables clients to easily utilise the
consolidated data to support other business applications and fulfil
their changing reporting requirements.”
Monte Titoli lays out Express II Roadmap
Italian central securities depository Monte Titoli has drawn up a
timetable for the launch of Express II, a new system for securities
settlement. It will provide a net settlement service integrated with
the current gross settlement service. The launch will be split into two
phases: from December 8, 2003, it will be used to settle corporate bond
transactions; from January 26, 2004 it will be able to settle all
securities transactions.
The net settlement service is organised into overnight and daytime
cycles and adopts different mechanisms for maximising the transactions
being settled. In particular, Monte Titoli says, the introduction of an
overnight net settlement cycle, which anticipates settlement finality
in the early hours of the morning, enables intermediaries to optimise
liquidity management. During the day, the platform will perform a
further net settlement process. Any transactions remaining unsettled
will be submitted to the gross settlement service.
By adopting this approach to managing unsettled contracts owing to the
unavailability of securities (technical fails), Express II allows for
the withdrawal of the forced borrowing procedures that are currently
managed by Banca d’Italia.
