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Smart Trade Technologies Rolls out its New smartTrade STUDIO Desktop for Dexia Group Traders in 12 Countries

Paris, France, March 11, 2004 – Smart Trade Technologies, the Paris-based software provider of multi-product trading platforms, is rolling out its new Studio front-end at the Dexia Group, upgrading the current version and expanding to new users in the same time.

The Smart Trade Transaction Platform (STTP) has been in place within the Dexia Group since March 2001 in order to facilitate internal transactions within the group on treasury markets, and consequently to increase the group’s internal liquidity and make important savings on cost of immobilized capital.

Traders of seven Dexia branches and subsidiaries – and soon 12 - are gathered around an internal smartTrade STTP platform, creating a true internal exchange where the live tradable quotes of the market-makers are orderly concentrated, compiled, an broadcasted to market-takers within the group, whether they are sent in a streaming mode or using RFQs.  A true internal exchange is thus in place, increasing internal opportunities to trade within the group, avoiding consumption of unnecessary capital compared to inter-bank trading, and, eventually, improving the group’s prices to the benefits of the clients.

Some precise configurable rules enable to respect the distribution pattern of prices within the   group, so that the level of transparency for the prices is controlled dynamically.  Capital cost savings have proven to be important since the implementation of the system, generating a large ROI to the project.  Although several front-ends can co-exist around the STTP platform, all using the same APIs, Dexia has chosen to deploy the new Studio application for all of their traders.

Better trading features
As a replacement of the previous version of the Smart Trade front-end, the new Studio application, released in Q4 2003, offers greater trading functionalities.  Dexia’s traders have actively participated in the final polishing of the application’s specifications, making it a tool really adapted to the group’s precise needs.

The new smartTrade STUDIO application, built on Microsoft® .NET framework, is delivered with a full set of enhanced features for traders, such as intuitive-orders capture window, aggregated and detailed view of the liquidity, connection to external liquidity providers/ECNs, automated price sourcing, control of the distribution zones, enhanced spread management, back-to-back deals, “feed copy and paste” directly from spreadsheets, sophisticated RFQ (Request For Quotes), multiple frameworks environments, graphical display plug-ins and improved live chat.  Like on an enhanced dashboard, in one single screen, traders can monitor market quotes, send their orders in a few mouse click and widen or narrow down the market spread as simply as three entries of the keyboard.  smartTrade STUDIO gives a real asset for any trader willing to interact instantly as the markets move.

A seamless deployment and integration in the Dexia IT infrastructure
The smartTrade Transaction platform is hosted and managed internally at Dexia.  The back-end application has been deployed in an existing farm of mutualized servers in Brussels, put in place in early 2003 in order to manage most of the front-office applications in a unified environment.  With such an organization, IT support and administration processes are consequently streamlined, and IT support costs reduced, while maintaining control of business-critical applications, such as ST.
The existing Dexia Group secured WAN is used to establish the connection between the numerous branches of the institution.

The OS used for the back-end is Windows 2000 Advanced Server with an Oracle database combined with a failover mechanism.  Studio is using standard desktop environments, facilitating the deployment (generally remotely).

The benefits of the new Studio front-end are now apparent to the bank, thanks to the clean production environment put in place at Dexia, and to the good synergy with the traders to fine-tune the application,” says Harry Gozlan, CEO and co-founder of Smart Trade.  “Volumes have peaked up consistently within a couple of months, which is a good sign of the adoption of the system by the users.  This implementation of the Smart Trade platform remains a straight way for a bank to generate important capital cost savings while building a dynamical internal trading mechanism.”

“The system has shown a very high-performance so far, above all for very short term products,” says Johan Evenepoel, head of Dexia Bank Money Market.

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