HSBC Global Markets Selects smartTrade as Global Order Routing and Trading Platform

Paris, France and London, England, September 6, 2005 – smartTrade Technologies announced today that HSBC Global Markets has chosen the smartTrade Technologies solution to become its global order routing and auto-execution middleware for capital markets trading.  The first component of the new system went live July 2005.

The project as a whole covers transactional flows between HSBC market-making centers, its traders, sales teams and clients.  A network of interconnected smartTrade Technologies platforms will lead to a highly open and flexible virtual market.  The smartTrade Technologies global order book supports various reconfigurable order types across any asset class and will enable rules-based trading.  The project will also be implemented and driven by HSBC IT teams, relying on the high level of
abstraction offered by the rich smartTrade development framework and APIs.  Bringing such a technology inside HSBC will help increase flexibility and speed-up development processes.

"Abstracting and unifying the trading and routing process will provide re-usable trading components across the bank.  This is a major goal of the project,” said Barry Flower, Global Head of e-Commerce IT, CIBM.  “Once implemented smartTrade Technologies will bring inside HSBC a common tool to deploy and manage a constantly changing network of trading communities, internally as well as externally.“

"It is a major step for our company.  We see here a perfect match between a large visionary institution like HSBC and a focused technology company very much advanced in the transactional space,” commented Harry Gozlan, CEO and co-founder of smartTrade. 

"This is a clear recognition of the quality of the product’s design and performance.  It confirms that our innovative IT architecture corresponds perfectly to the new ambitious requirements of leading institutions for their next generation trading systems,” added David Vincent, CTO and co-founder of smartTrade.

About smartTrade
Founded in 1999 by financial markets and IT professionals, Smart Trade Technologies is an independent software vendor.  The smartTrade Technologies solution is a powerful, numerical, electronic-trading and distribution-matching framework for all types of financial instruments.  It is accessible through various APIs (in Java, .Net and COM) and respects all existing legacy environments.  The smartTrade engine has already been adopted by several European and US institutions.

For further information, please contact:
Harry Gozlan, hgozlan@smart-trade.net
David Vincent, dvincent@smart-trade.net
Tel : +33 1 44 50 19 19