A BATTLE IS under way throughout the financial services industry to
remove the human touch from trade processing. After at least 20
years chasing this hallowed goal, it seemed the industry was close
when the Securities Industry Association (SIA) stipulated that
straight-through processing had to be sufficiently perfected to
ensure T+1 - trade plus settlement on the following day - by 2005.
But that has proved to be an unrealizable target, and the race to
T+1 has been indefinitely postponed. Progress is far from
guaranteed. "Without a specific collective deliverable or
imperative to demonstrate improvements within a specific timeframe,
it's sometimes a struggle to see what we will be able to achieve,"
says Jane Levi, member of the operations strategy and development
group at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein. "The whole industry is
torn between needing to make progress and to change today, whilst
knowing that the tools to help them, like interoperability or
standards convergence, won't be ready for another...
