Chemical Bank Uses SPCSS With Digital Feeds In London

Chemical Bank last month took a step toward global trading capability with the installation in London of a dealing room that will combine its Advanced Trader Workstation system with Rich/Reuters video-based Prism. The bank plans to link the London room with its New York operations.

The bank went live January 30 with 150 positions trading in foreign exchange and money market instruments. The room is served by a Prism video switch that provides access to video-based information services. But the bank also plans to phase in ATW alongside Prism to take advantage of the development of digital information feeds.

According to Anthony Herriott, a senior vice president, the coexistence of digital and video demonstrates the bank's recognition that video, though regarded as obsolete, will be around for some time to come. The combined digital-video configuration, he says, will allow the bank to phase in digitally delivered information services as they are developed.

Key to the implementation of ATW is the PriceWatch Digital Information System, a digital information distribution software package developed and marketed by SPC Software Services Inc., a unit of Security Pacific Corp.

Chemical already has installed PriceWatch in New York, where it is serving five dealers in a pilot program alongside the New York room's 400-position Rich/Reuters video-based trading system. PriceWatch provides Reuters RTDF and Telerate TDPF to the traders, who access the system using Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) Personal VAX (PVAX) machines as interface. PriceWatch runs on a DEC VAX 3600. The five ATW pilot positions handle data "in all trading areas," Herriott says.

In London, PriceWatch is providing 140 dealing positions with digital information from Reuters and Telerate. Because the ATW has not yet been installed there, however, dealers cannot currently use PriceWatch to manipulate feeds switched through Prism.

According to Martin Lewis, head of information technology group for Europe, Chemical is considering which workstation to install in London. He expects to install the system at three or four positions running on Sun Microsystems Inc. workstations within the next month. He says Chemical will add further AWT positions running on either Sun machines or DEC PVAXs later.

As in New York, the London room will use a DEC VAX 3600 to distribute the digital data and drive the video-switch access mechanism. PriceWatch also delivers to workstations a real-time in-house feed of the bank's pricing information generated from an IBM System/38 machine. The ATW features dynamic page display, composite page creation, quotation display, system bulletin board, page parsing and real-time spreadsheet.

The bank plans to link the PriceWatch systems installed in New York and London to allow the sharing of internal and bulletin board information. Lewis says the link, running DECnet between the two PriceWatch systems, would carry U.K.-generated rates to New York and U.S.-generated information to London. As yet, no such link is planned to Tokyo, where the bank has a Reuters Triarch dealing system in place.