Europe: Swift shutdown

Swift shutdown While U.S. competitor Blackbird is hiking deals with the CME, Londex, an electronic trade-matching service for OTC derivatives in the United Kingdom, has ceased operations despite receiving the backing of Chase Manhattan, J.P. Morgan and other large banking institutions.

"Another

provider [Swift] had an incumbent market share from the beginning, and we simply realized that a critical mass of banks [was] too used to dealing with their platform and we weren't going to persuade them to make the investments necessary to switch over to ours," says a spokesman for BCE Emergis, a Canadian B2B platform provider that purchased Londex in 1998.

"Trade-matching and back-office systems for derivatives are a tight niche, and one that is definitely finite," the spokesman says.

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