CORE DUMP

The final draft of the General Accounting Office's report on price availability in the U.S. Treasuries market was released Sept. 14. As expected, the report recommended that Congress enact legislation to require Treasuries dealers and brokers to broaden access to pricing information. It said that voluntary efforts by market players to expand pricing availability had proven inadequate. The report was originally scheduled for publication last March.

Reuters Holdings PLC announced a major corporate restructuring. Among the highlights, the real-time and historical information groups will be merged under Buford Smith, group product leader in Reuters real-time information services division in New York. Trading room systems group product leader David Morgan will become marketing director of Reuters in Europe, Middle East and Africa, with responsibility for coordinating worldwide marketing across the information and trading room systems product lines. Peter Benjamin, former group product leader of historical information, will become director of special projects with emphasis on acquisitions.

A full-page advertisement in the Sept. 19 Wall Street Journal placed by Telerate Systems Inc. says that "in the last three months, usage of the [The Trading Service] network has tripled." The ad further states that in little more than a year, TTS has "gained hundreds of customers," and that TTS, an automated foreign exchange trading service, now serves FX traders in 36 financial centers around the world. The ad comes in the wake of reports (TST, July 30) that the number of TTS user sites had dropped from 200 to 138 as a result of dissatisfaction with the service.

TTS reportedly did not fail, however, on the morning of Sept. 18, when Telerate's worldwide financial information services went down for more than two hours as a result of a power outage at Telerate's main computer facility in Jersey City, N.J. The outage was caused by a problem at the Public Service Electric & Gas's power closet that services the area. "A rodent got inside a ground-level electrical switch, causing it to fail, which affected two circuits at the Harborside complex in New Jersey," says a PSE&G spokesperson.

C.ATS Software Inc. has released version 6.0 of its workstation-based front-office analytic and risk management software package used by international money markets traders. The new package includes back-office facilities, such as accounting and cash flow managing software. C.ATS also recently inked a joint sales agreement with Nippon Steel, which makes Nippon Steel sales agent for C.ATS in Japan. C.ATS has had its own sales and support office in Tokyo since 1988.

The International Stock Exchange (ISE) in London announced that it will use software by Vista Concepts Inc. as the "cornerstone" of its planned Taurus settlement system. Taurus will provide "clearance, vaulting and settlement" of high volume domestic and international securities trading. The Vista software is to be live by October 1991. Vista is a subsidiary of NYNEX Information Solutions Group.

Parties interested in purchasing Micrognosis Inc. currently include Bosch of West Germany and Matsushita of Japan, sources say. It was recently revealed (see related article, this issue) that Quotron Systems Inc.'s TSS service would support video switch products from Bosch. Japan-based KDD, which was originally thought to be interested in Micrognosis, has lost interest, sources say.

Reuters Holdings PLC has acquired Uplink, one of seven companies licensed in the U.K. to compete with British Telecom and Mercury Communications in the satellite communications market. Reuters had reportedly attempted to buy the company several years ago but was turned down because it planned to use the company for its own purposes rather then for commercially available service.

Goldman Sachs & Co. confirmed that Malcolm Draper, VP, LAN and workstation technology, is no longer with the company. Details of his leaving were not disclosed.

Radar Financial L.P. is set to announce the appointment of Mark Wood as chief executive officer, according to sources. Wood previous employer was Atlantic Computers Ltd. a subsidiary of British & Commonwealth Holdings PLC. Radar executives could not be reached for comment.