HSBC Trustee signs up as an early adopter of Omgeo CTM

HSBC Trustee joins the latest round of institutions to sign up for Omgeo's straight through trade processing system. The Hong Kong bank is one of 12 global financial firms to adopt the system. Many of these firms have operations in Asia including Goldman Sachs Prime Brokerage, Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan Chase.

The announcement brings the number of investment managers and broker/dealers that have agreed to implement the central matching system to 29 following the launch of CTM in February this year. Omgeo CTM is a workflow-oriented trade management solution for domestic and cross-border trades that provides real-time settlement instruction enrichment and settlement notification messaging.

The investment managers are migrating from Omgeo's current OASYS Global system to the new CTM platform and, as early adopters, are getting the new system for the old price up to June 2002.

"Given current market conditions, firms need the flexibility to determine the size and scope of their straight through processing (STP) projects and reap genuine returns on their investments," says James Drumm, managing director Asia Pacific for Omgeo. The migration strategy is designed to allow firms to implement STP at their own pace.

The latest announcement includes the addition of three STP vendor partners - HelioGraph, Mercator and SimCorp. The latter two have offices in Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia. CEO and chairman of Mercator, Roy King, says: "The reaction and take up of Mercator CSS has been very encouraging and the addition of Omgeo CTM capabilities will make the product set even more attractive to our joint clients."

In February, Omgeo announced its first round of investment managers joining the early adopter program including Hong Kong based hedge fund Sofaer Global Research.