About Me

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I am former editor of The Banker, a Financial Times publication. I joined the publication in August 2015 as transaction banking and technology editor, was promoted to deputy editor in September 2016 and then to managing editor in April 2019. The crowning glory was my appointment as editor in March 2021, the first female editor in the publication's history. Previously I was features editor at Profit&Loss, editorial director of Treasury Today and editor of gtnews.com. I also worked on Banking Technology, Computer Weekly and IBM Computer Today. I have a BSc from the University of Victoria, Canada.

Friday 24 July 2009

Bullet proof IT

Features

Business continuity is about disaster-proofing the business to ensure it keeps running 24x7. To adhere to regulations like Basel II or new standards like BS25999, financial institutions have got to prove they have robust, best practices in place.

High profile disasters like the 7 July London bombings and the events of 11 September, or potential epidemics like SARS or Bird Flu, have brought business continuity out of a dark corner and into the boardroom. But it’s not just big headline problems that effect the ability of a firm to run its business: the most well laid plans can also be disrupted by events that seem benign at first, like the 2012 Olympic Games which are effectively capping electricity supplies to Canary Wharf limiting the data centre expansion much needed in the financial sector.

Business continuity, simply, is the ability to roll with the punches and stay up and running no matter what. Financial firms are well aware of the threat to their business caused by an outage – client trust in the reputation, brand and business of a financial institution can waver. HSBC is one bank that has had recent experiences of outages.

Since the beginning of the year, HSBC’s Secure ePayments service has gone down three times – a fairly significant outage in January followed by more significant outages in March and the beginning of April. Merchants clamoured for compensation because they couldn’t process their payments, thereby losing out on business themselves. HSBC’s UK press office had not responded to Banking Technology’s questions regarding the outages or its business continuity plans by the time we closed for press.

To its corporate customers, HSBC appeared to be without a contingency plan. Said one client: “One doesn’t expect a major international bank to be in a position where it has no continuity arrangements in place such that, whatever it is that goes wrong, it doesn’t take the bank out of business for 48 to 72 hours. Also it shouldn’t put its customer service in the position where they can only say ‘we also don’t know what is going on – keep trying every 15 minutes’. If you run an e-commerce service, you have in place a rollover so that if your main system goes down your backup comes online – that is a pretty basic part of business continuity planning.”

David Porter, head of security and risk at technology consultancy firm Detica, dismisses the idea that a modern bank would be without a business continuity plan, but argues that the bigger issue is probably the question of when that plan was last dusted off, refreshed and simulated.

“In the old days you put your BCP in place and then you could all go down the pub and say job done,” says Porter. “But now banks need to dust off their plans and really re-assess them in light of today’s risks. Ten years ago, being deprived of the internet for 24 hours across all employees may not have been such a big deal, but I wonder how the average organisation today would cope if their email or internet access went down even for a few hours.”

Porter points out that the way data gets linked together – the soft human and also the hard data links – means that BCP practitioners should keep in mind that very small changes in one part of this massively linked network can have sudden and unforeseen implications on another, seemly unconnected, part. He uses the example of Buntsfield oil depot explosion in the UK which was connected to a number of employees at various companies not getting their 2005 Christmas payroll – all because of an unforeseen series of links between the explosion and a computer system nearby.

To cope with disasters hitting a specific location, most financial institutions’ best practice has been to move from local-oriented concepts, like mirroring data across distances of 10 or 30 kilometres, to more sophisticated schemes of having a third data centre in a different country or even a different continent. “Typically customers, large banking or financial institutions, would have a dual site setup where they do synchronous mirroring across mostly fibre optical links within distances up to 30 kilometres,” says Matthias Werner, secretary and co-chair, events committee at the Storage Networking Industry Association Europe.

“In order to comply with the needs for extended distances back up or disaster recovery sites, most of these customers would have a third site where they do asynchronous copy of most or all of their data thousands of kilometres away. To do asynchronous copying, you don’t have any physical limitations because typically these are remote sites and they would lag a couple of seconds or even minutes behind real-time data centres.” Werner believes that the three sites concept – having two synchronous sites and one asynchronous remote site – is cutting edge technology.

Tim Furmidge, head of products in BT’s financial services group, has a different take on the solution. “What firms are doing is distributing their systems across the main trading floor and perhaps a back up data centre or a disaster recovery location – but the secondary or tertiary system isn’t a separate lights out system that they are waiting to turn on if they need it. It is operating day in and day out and effectively it is a part of the day-to-day operational platform,” he says.

“If there is a flood in the trading building, the equipment that is deployed in a remote data centre carries on taking the full load instead of running a partial load. And if the traders can’t get into the trading floor they can relocate to alternative trading facilities either regular office buildings or purpose built ATF floors and then they can connect into the systems from there.”

BT’s ITS voice trading system can split the physical and voice communication service over multiple data centres; it allows traders to connect to their turrets over the network so that they can connect in from a remote alternative trading location or come in over a web browser from home. And with BT’s Radianz shared market infrastructure, many firms have dual connections coming into their main trading building to their data centre, so if they lose their main building they can very easily switch their market data services down electronic feeds to alternative locations.

GoldenGate Software promotes a dual online approach and focuses solely on the continuous availability of data because, as Sami Akbay, vice president of marketing and product management, points out: “Data is somewhat unique in the sense that unlike hardware, software, wires, and cables, once you lose data you cannot really replace it. You can buy new servers, cables, racks, and all that stuff but if you have lost the data you are in deep trouble.”

With GoldenGate’s Active/Active service, both the main and the backup systems are processing transactions and if one becomes unavailable the other one seamlessly takes over and when the primary system comes back online the workload is redistributed again without any transaction loss (see box).

These best practices and more have been codified in a new British standard BS25999, for which a certification service was launched last October. This allows firms to prove that they are following best practices, something that was difficult to show hard evidence for previously. But if the standard is to succeed, it has to be a generic standard that the small guy can cope with as well as the big guys. Many of the top financial and banking organisations, however, believe that they are already equal to, or in advance of, the standards set out by BS25999.

Mike Osborne managing director of ICM Business Continuity Services says that these financial institutions will look at the standard as a supply chain management tool. “Most banks think they are better than that, but they are looking at their supply chain – the firms that dovetail into their technology solutions in terms of information feeds, service providers, etc. Where BS25999 will have its part to play in the banking sector is the way in which the smaller organisations are asked to comply with BS25999. I personally believe that if they don’t, the banks will say I am sorry we are not going to renew our relationship with you because you represent too high a risk.”

Swedbank takes Active/Active approach

Nordic retail bank Swedbank processes electronic payment requests for a number of Swedish and international banks, as well as ATM transactions and payment requests for its own customers. With its growing international presence, the bank now processes more than one billion transactions per year.

Swedbank has been a long-time user of ACI’s Base24 application running on HP NonStop servers. Initially, its business continuity plan involved operating a “hot” backup site for testing and for failover in the event of an unplanned primary system failure. However, as it continued its global expansion, the time that it took to fail over to the backup system for both planned and unplanned outages barred Swedbank from achieving true 24x7 availability for its customers. The bank realised that any type of outage has an impact on customer satisfaction and loyalty, which ultimately can affect the bank’s revenue.

In 2006 Swedbank decided to implement an Active/Active configuration with GoldenGate’s High Availability solution. “Having evaluated various data migration and availability solutions, we decided to deploy GoldenGate because of its interoperability with the ACI Base24 application, and because the solution had already been proven elsewhere at Swedbank where it was deployed by other departments,” says Magnus Kleveby, systems area manager for authorisation processing at Swedbank.

The Swedbank Active/Active system runs on two HP NonStop server nodes separated geographically for disaster tolerance best practice reasons. Both databases are active and are processing different transactions against their own copies of the Base24 application database. Additionally, transactions are split between the databases to provide load balancing. In the event that one database fails or must be taken offline for planned hardware or software maintenance, upgrades, or migrations, all transactions are simply routed to the surviving node for processing. Thus, planned downtime is eliminated; and recovery from a sudden failure occurs literally within seconds.

“In the event of an unexpected outage, we can restore data within seconds and the system can cope with sudden peaks in demand, such as at the end of the month when most people do a lot of shopping or go online to pay bills,” says Kleveby. “GoldenGate has given us the assurance we are looking for and we can maintain our level of customer service no matter what.”

Swedbank’s Active/Active configuration was also leveraged during a migration across the HP NonStop environment when moving to the new HP Integrity platform. By taking down one server at a time, upgrading it, and then returning it to service, this major upgrade was achieved with no application downtime.

Credit crunch squeezes IT budget

News

IT budgets are flatlining as UK banks expect market downturn to deepen.

UK financial institutions are tightening their belts as the credit crunch digs in, with plans for spending on IT bottoming out, according to the most recent Financial Services Survey from the Confederation of British Industry and PricewaterhouseCoopers. This is a sharp reversal from the previous survey in January that found FIs planning to increase investment in IT, which was at its strongest since September 1997.

Commenting on the turnaround, Andrew Gray, UK banking advisory leader, PwC, said that the last survey covered the end of the year where the IT spend had already been budgeted in before the downturn started. “Now we are seeing a realignment of IT budgets and banks are more conservative in spend. They are looking to support existing customers and invest in core business. They are not investing in new products or going after new customers,” he said. Only 38% said they were looking to reach new customers, compared to 63% in March 2007, and 44% said they were looking to provide new services, compared to 63% last year; 78% were investing to increase efficiency/speed.

Other findings of the survey were:

▪ Business sentiment among financial services firms has continued to worsen, and a balance of 29% reported that they are less optimistic about the overall business situation in their sector than they were in December.

▪ Business volumes fell sharply, as 17% of respondents said volumes had grown in the last three months to early March, while 47% said they had decreased. The resulting balance of -30% followed December’s near 17-year low of 33%, and was worse than expected.

▪ 44% of respondents reported a fall in the value of fees, commissions and premiums, while income from net interest, investment and trading also fell sharply. Both of these income categories are expected to fall heavily again over the next three months.

▪ 25% said that they had cut jobs over the past three months, which is the highest rate since March 2003. Firms’ expectations for employment over the next few months (a balance of 33% expecting numbers employed to be reduced) were the weakest since December 2002.

▪ Even more firms think the credit squeeze will be prolonged that did so three months ago – 90% believe that it will last longer that six months compared to 70% last quarter. Nearly all businesses (97%) believe that there is a good chance that credit conditions will get worse over the next six months – 35% said it was a “high” likelihood and 62% saying it was “medium”.

▪ 40% of firms believe that their ability to raise funds will be a constraint on business growth in the coming 12 months. This is up from 24% last quarter.

▪ Capital investment in buildings and plants and machinery are at their lowest since 1992.

Ian McCafferty, CBI chief economist, said that this is clearly a “particularly serious financial issue”, and, although it hasn’t had a significant effect broad economy yet, the real economy won’t get away scot free. “The markets have gummed up and there is little trust amongst market participants. Unravelling that degree of difficulty will take time – there is no silver bullet to open up markets. The survey shows that there is recognition across the industry that it is going to take some time before everything is back to normal.”

Latin fire

Features

Latin America has seen stable growth for the past few years, but can it ride out a global storm?

With the world’s biggest economy facing a recession – and possible depression – markets around the world are scrambling to prevent a domino effect. Geographically in the US’s backyard and tied closely to its economy through commodity exports, one would expect that the countries across Latin America would fear the worst. But Luiz de Mello, head of Latin America Unit Desk of the Economics Department of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, doesn’t believe that the contagion will be severe because the region is much better placed than it was in the past to cope with this type of crisis.

“Nowadays they have a much stronger balance of payments, much stronger fiscal positions, there is falling external indebtedness in many cases and high international reserves, so that provides a pretty good cushion for the region to withstand any possible contagion, any possible exteriorisation in global financial conditions,” says de Mello. “Commodity prices remain very high – which are good for the region for many countries are commodity exporters and that also gives them an extra buffer to deal with any crisis.”

Markus Jaeger, global risk analysis, Deutsche Bank Research, warns that resilience hinges on commodity prices staying high. “The main risk from my point of view, in the short to medium term, is the commodity price story – if commodity prices were to collapse (commodity prices are hard to predict but market fundamentals suggest and my gut feeling is that they will remain strong for the foreseeable future) then I think the ballgame would change for Latin America, especially the weaker countries like Venezuela and Argentina.”

The weakness he speaks of is country-specific and depends on their position within the global economy. The countries more reliant on exporting goods to the US, for example Mexico, where 80-90% of its exports goes to the US, and many Central American countries, would be badly hit if there is a slow down in the American market or a continuing devaluation of the dollar, which effectively makes their exports more expensive in comparison. Other countries, like Chile, Brazil and Argentina, have a much more balanced composition of exports, so they are less affected by what happens in the US.

De Mello believes that there will be a deceleration in economic growth across the region but that slow down will not be catastrophic – most countries will be able to compensate for the lower export demand by relying more on the domestic demand, which is expanding and sustaining growth in many countries, particularly Brazil, Mexico and Chile.

“Increase in domestic demand in the old days often ran into constraints, like a weak external financing position or domestic inflation,” says Jaeger, referring to the 1980s and 1990s when these countries were prone to economic shocks. “This time you have – especially in Brazil – a sustainable increase in domestic demand which is driving overall economic growth. This is due to the much greater sustainability of the current macroecononic policy mix, lower interest rates and expanding domestic credit.

“The [Brazilian] government’s fiscal policy is also geared at expanding the consumer. There is a programme called Bolsa Familia, which is basically cash transfers to lower income families so they can increase their consumption levels, so the fiscal policy is also geared towards stimulating domestic demand. But it is different from the past; fiscal policy in the Brazilian and Mexican case is sustainable.”

Bolsa Familia is a programme whereby the government offers low income families money in exchange for their commitment to send their children to school. This has boosted consumption amongst low income families and it is also good news from an economic growth perspective because the next generation of people are better educated.

Historically Latin America has been a region that had a very unequal distribution of income but that is changing. De Mello says: “Income inequality is coming down in the countries where the problem is most severe; this is through a combination of both labour market conditions and social transfers effectively targeting the poor.”

The policy changes have stimulated demand for private banking and wealth management technology.

Technology firm Misys is working with a Tier 1 financial institution in Mexico that is building into this area. Steve Mills, head of Latin America business operations at Misys, explains: “There is a development of a middle class economy. You see that in Brazil with the emergence of products like credit cards and unprotected credit, as well as mortgages. If you looked around the region 10 years ago, finding a mortgage was incredibly difficult. Now with the availability of mortgage financing across the region, you are seeing the lengthening of the yield curve in general so that what was really a two to five year yield curve at the most is now 25-30 year yield curve, which historically wasn’t possible because of inflation.”

He says that the amount of wealth in both Mexico and Brazil is “really astounding”. “The international banks, as well as the local banks, are trying to come in and take part in that and provide some of the expertise that they have for individuals in the markets there. From a technical trend perspective the international players would like to be able to have their international investment banking platform and private banking platform in a single consolidated system. Private banking customers are becoming more and more sophisticated – they want more availability of what you would traditionally think of as investment banking products. So it is not just bond and equity based investment banking business – it is getting into more complicated structures, derivatives, etc.”

And this growth in individual wealth is giving a boost to the stock markets in the region. Mills sees many projects in the equities space – “a building out of custodial equities capabilities with some clients and looking at algorithmic trading, so the ability to do high volume, technically driven trading, which hasn’t been there in the past.”

This is attracting attention from outside the region. Chicago Board of Trade took an equity position in Bovespa, the São Paulo stock exchange. In January this year, voice and electronic interdealer broker ICAP acquired a 15% stake in the Bolsa de Productos de Chile, a commodity exchange in Chile. With this stake, ICAP becomes the first international investor to have an ownership stake in a Chilean exchange.

Exchange consolidation is starting to happen within the region. Mills says that one trend that will be interesting to watch in Brazil specifically is the potential merger of Bovespa and the BM&F, Brazil’s main futures exchange – the discussions are underway and there are still regulatory hurdles, but the merger would create the third largest exchange in the world.

Guillermo Kopp, executive director, global research fellow, TowerGroup, believes that the region as a whole is slightly behind the consolidation curve that is being seen in Europe; right now the move is to interconnect globally. “What is happening now is interconnectivity – exchanges are still playing a role in development of capital markets locally within countries so they have a reason for their existence. But from an order execution perspective and efficiency and access to liquidity there is no reason why they shouldn’t follow the flow in the world.” He believes that they won’t integrate in the near future unless they are engulfed by a bigger international player.

Mills agrees. “I think what you are going to see is partnerships and alliances between the exchanges over the next two to five years and then the next evolutionary step from there further down the road will be mergers of exchanges as well.”

Kopp considers Latin America to be a hotbed of technology innovation because people in Latin America try to do more with less. “That is the general rule. And when it comes to technology, they become very creative.

“If you look at a country like Brazil, it is not that they have little, but they are very ingenious,” he says. “They have a robust industry in some advanced technologies. IT is a little bit of a catch up but they have fairly large institutions – one is Banco Itaú and they have a subsidiary Itaú Tech, which is a service bureau and, indeed, it is one of the top 100 technology companies globally. They are very savvy in managing their resources.”

Guatemala

Population: 12,728,111 (July 2007 est.)

Below poverty line: 56.2% (2004 est.)

GDP: $67.45 billion (2007 est.)

Currency: quetzal (GTQ), USD, others allowed In 2007 the Banco de Guatemala launched a payment system modernisation matrix which included: regulation of the automated clearing house; revision of the administrative procedures of the RTGS system; and selecting one provider for the check processing system.

El Salvador

Population: 6,948,073 (July 2007 est.)

Below poverty line: 35.2% (2005 est.)

GDP: $35.97 billion (2007 est.)

Currency: USD

Stock exchange: Bolsa de Valores de El Salvador.

Nicaragua

Population: 5,675,356 (July 2007 est.)

Below poverty line: 48% (2005)

GDP: $18.17 billion (2007 est.)

Currency: gold cordoba (NIO)

Stock exchange: Bolsa de Valores de Nicaragua.

Panama:

Population: 3,242,173 (July 2007 est.)

Below poverty line: 37% (1999 est.)

GDP: $29.14 billion (2007 est.)

Currency: balboa (PAB); USD Bolsa de Valores de Panamá, Panama’s stock exchange, is among the most developed in Central America; it saw transactions worth a total of $2.28 billion in 2007.

The BVP has tried to modernise the local securities market by creating a securities liquidation and custody entity which led to the creation of the Central Latinoamericana de Valores, or LatinClear, which started operations in 1997 to provide clearing and liquidation services for stock exchange operations through its electronic systems to reduce operational risks and to efficiently liquidate and clear securities transactions.

Mexico

Population: 108,700,891 (July 2007 est.)

Below poverty line: 13.8%

GDP: $1.353 trillion (2007 est.)

Currency: Mexican peso (MXN)

Bolsa Mexicana de Valores, Mexico’s stock exchange, temporarily suspended trading as its main IPC index .MXX posted gains of over 6% on 22 January this year. Traders said huge volume was the reason for the suspension. (source: Reuters)

Dominican Republic

Population: 9,365,818 (July 2007 est.)

Below poverty line: 42.2% (2004)

GDP: $85.4 billion (2007 est.)

Currency: Dominican peso (DOP) In October 2007, Logica won the Banco Central de la República Dominicana bid to implement a new Real Time Gross Settlement system. The BCRD will use Logica’s Central Accounting System, part of the Logica Clearing & Settlement Solutions set, to implement a high value clearing and settlement interbank system. The RTGS system will be the backbone of the Sipard.

Stock exchange: Bolsa de Valores de la República Dominicana.

Costa Rica

Population: 4,133,884 (July 2007 est.)

Below poverty line: 18% (2004 est.)

GDP: $55.95 billion (2007 est.)

Currency: Costa Rican colon (CRC) In May 2007 Banco Central de Costa Rica decided to migrate its database servers to a pure 64-bit computing platform that runs on Windows Server 2003 Enterprise x64 Edition operating system and the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 database. The software, combined with new 64-bit IBM server hardware, is helping the bank improve the performance of financial transactions, increase the reliability of the system, and attain scalability that will enable the transaction system to grow with future demand and new financial services.

Bolsa Nacional de Valores – Costa Rica saw daily trading volume rise to $140 million in at the end of 2005 and market capitalisation was standing at $2.1 billion. There are several thousand listings on the exchange, and around 30 brokerages are permitted to trade securities on the BNV. The trading process is completely automated. The systems used by the Bolsa Nacional de Valores have been created for the needs of the securities market and designed by Costa Rican technicians.

Honduras

Population: 7,483,763 (July 2007 est.)

Below poverty line: 50.7% (2004)

GDP: $24.69 billion (2007 est.)

Currency: lempira (HNL)

Stock exchange: Bolsa Centroamericana de Valores, Honduras.

Ecuador

Population: 13,755,680 (July 2007 est.)

Below poverty line: 38.3% (2006)

GDP: $98.28 billion (2007 est.)

Currency: the US dollar (USD); the sucre was eliminated in 2000

On 5 October 2007, after it had expelled the World Bank representative in April, Ecuador threw out the IMF’s resident representative from the offices of the central bank, Banco Central del Ecuador. Ecuador’s economy minister Ricardo Patiño said that the IMF was welcome to have an office in the country, but that it would have to find its own location in a private building. The IMF has withdrawn its representative from Ecuador entirely.

Stock exchanges: Bolsa de Valores de Quito, Bolsa de Valores de Guayaquil.

Cuba

Population: 11,394,043 (July 2007 est.)

Below poverty line: N/A

GDP: $51.11 billion (2007 est.)

Currency: Cuban peso (CUP) and Convertible peso (CUC)

The creation of Banco Central de Cuba in May 1997 provided the country with an institution capable of concentrating its efforts in the execution of its central banking functions and established a two-tier banking system integrated by BCC and a group of banks and non-banking financial institutions.

Venezuela

Population: 26,023,528 (July 2007 est.)

Below poverty line: 37.9% (end 2005 est.)

GDP: $335 billion (2007 est.)

Currency: bolivar (VEB)

In 1989, the Bolsa de Valores de Caracas, following the liberalisation of the economy, saw large increase in trade volumes. The Automated Exchange Trading System (SATB) developed by the Vancouver Stock Exchange was acquired in order to fulfil the needs of the members for having a high-tech trading application. The SATB system started its activities in November of 1992. In 1994 the exchange implemented two new systems: the Remote Connection System (Sistecor) and the Electronic Compensation and Liquidation System (Secomli).

Haiti

Population: 8,706,497 (July 2007 est.)

Below poverty line: 80% (2003 est.)

GDP: $15.82 billion (2007 est.)

Currency: gourde (HTG)

The Haitian Stock Exchange exists but the exchange’s website is only partially complete. The websites “contacts” and “investor relations” pages list Global Trading Group as a partner of the market; Global is a stock brokerage located in Westbury, New York.

Colombia

Population: 44,379,598 (July 2007 est.)

Below poverty line: 49.2% (2005)

GDP: $320.4 billion (2007 est.)

Currency: Colombian peso (COP)

Banco de la República de Colombia, the central bank, manages the Electronic Negotiation System, which is a centralised electronic trading mechanism. The ENS allows for trading of securities deposited in the Central Securities Deposit, a computerised system designed to administrate the securities by means of electronic records. Its objectives are to eliminate the risks of handling physical paper, to speed up transactions in the secondary market, and to facilitate the payment of principal and/or interest coupons.

The Bolsa de Valores de Colombia is the principal stock exchange. It was created on 3 July 2001 by the union of three extant stock exchanges in Colombia: Bolsa de Bogotá, Bolsa de Medellín and the Bolsa de Occidente in Cali.

Peru

Population: 28,674,757 (July 2007 est.)

Below poverty line: 44.5% (2006)

GDP: $217.5 billion (2007 est.)

Currency: nuevo sol (PEN)

The value of shares traded on Bolsa de Valores de Lima, the Lima Stock Exchange, has increased 55-fold since 1990.

Paraguay

Population: 6,669,086 (July 2007 est.)

Below the poverty line: 32% (2005 est.)

GDP: $26.55 billion (2007 est.)

Currency: guarani (PYG)

Stock exchange: Bolsa de Valores y Productos de Asunción (Bvpasa).

Bolivia

Population: 9,119,152 (July 2007 est.)

Below poverty line: 60% (2006 est.)

GDP: $39.78 billion (2007 est.)

Currency: boliviano (BOB)

Bolivia has a central bank, Banco Central de Bolivia, and nine private banks. About 90% of Bolivian bank deposits are held in US dollars. (source: Wikipedia)

Bolsa Boliviana de Valores, Bolivia’s stock market, expanded in 1998 to include corporate bonds, along with the money market and government bond options that had existed previously. The privatisation of Bolivia’s social security program has bolstered the stock market.

Brazil

Population: 190,010,647 (July 2007 est.)

Below poverty line: 31% (2005)

GDP: $1.838 trillion (2007 est.)

Currency: real (BRL)

Bovespa, the São Paulo stock exchange, is the largest stock trading centre in Latin America, concentrating about 70% of the volume of trades carried out in the region. (source: Bovespa)

On 28 August 2007 Bovespa Holding was created with two subsidiaries Bovespa, responsible for the operations by the stock exchange and the organised over-the-counter markets, and the Companhia Brasileira de Liquiddacao e Custodia (CBLC), which provides settlement, clearing and depository services.

On 21 February 2006 Bovespa agreed to develop its new information technology infrastructure in partnership with HP, Intel and Microsoft. The new platform, launched in 2007, fully replaces the mainframe and gives greater flexibility in adapting to the volume of transactions on the stock exchange. To implement the new system required reconstructing all systems of the Bovespa and the CBLC.

On the table is the potential merger of Bovespa and the BM&F, Brazil’s main futures exchange – those discussions are underway and there are regulatory hurdles still to be met, but that would create the third largest exchange in the world.

Uruguay

Population: 3,460,607 (July 2007 est.)

Below poverty line: 27.37% of households (2006)

GDP: $37.05 billion (2007 est.)

Currency: Uruguayan peso (UYU)

Stock exchange: Bolsa Electronica de Valores del Uruguay.

Argentina

Population: 40,301,927 (July 2007 est.)

Below poverty line: 23.4% (January-June 2007)

GDP: $523.7 billion (2007 est.)

Currency: Argentine peso (ARS)

The Banco Central de la República Argentina continues to promote measures to make the National Payments System more efficient, agile and secure.

Merval (Mercado de Valores de Buenos Aires): after gaining 22% in the second half of 2006, the Merval ended the first half of 2007 with an increase of 4.8%.

Chile

Population: 16,284,741 (July 2007 est.)

Below poverty line: 18.2% (2005)

GDP: $234.4 billion (2007 est.)

Currency: Chilean peso (CLP)

On 2 April 2007, the Banco Central de Chile adopted a new regulatory framework organised according to three general criteria: modernisation, reinforcement and simplification of regulations.

2006 was very positive for the Santiago Stock Exchange, La Bolsa de Comercio de Santiago, reaching a $116 million of daily average volume of traded shares. (source: La Bolsa de Comercio de Santiago Annual report 2006)

In January 2008, voice and electronic interdealer broker ICAP acquired a 15% stake in the Bolsa de Productos de Chile, a commodity exchange in Chile. With this stake, ICAP becomes the first international investor to have an ownership stake in a Chilean exchange.

Brazil and Mexico lead EMV adoption

Brazil and Mexico are leading the wave of EMV chip and PIN card migration in Latin America, and are converting in a phased manner that is unique to the region, transitioning from early EMV to full EMV. Full EMV is where the complete payments infrastructure is EMV-compliant, from the card to the back office processing. Both countries are poised to go for full EMV.

Already well advanced in EMV card issuing, Mexico is making fast progress in migration on the acquisition level by convincing the major retailers to upgrade their point of sale terminals. “Brazil has progressed well in this area too – with almost 95% of POS terminals EMV-enabled”, says David Chevrel, director of Latin America at Aconite Technology, a UK-based firm which helps banks migrate to EMV with minor changes to their core banking system. “At the chip card level, an estimated 60% of active cards are already migrated, hence the desire of the banks to update their back office processing and to go full EMV this year.”

Aconite believes that the north of South America, such as Colombia, Venezuela, Peru and some countries in Central America like Panama and Costa Rica, are likely to move fast this year and will start with issuing EMV-compliant cards to bring them in line with developments in Brazil and Mexico.

The primary driver to move to the EMV standard globally, and certainly in Latin America, in the short term is fraud reduction. Plus compliancy incentives from Visa and MasterCard are helping banks make the decision to migrate. “The fact that Brazil and Mexico are moving to EMV encourages their neighbours to take action to avoid a well-known phenomenon of fraud migrating from EMV-enabled countries to other that aren’t. This occurrence is also witnessed within the same country. For example, in Mexico some card issuers who were slightly delayed compared to the early adopters noticed a difference in fraud levels in their card portfolio,” says Chevrel.

There are some additional mid-term country-specific drivers. For instance, the Brazilian card issuers have a good understanding of the benefits of offline transactions, and therefore most of them are looking forward to the full implementation of EMV to be able to operate offline. In the mag-stripe world, every transaction must go online and be processed by the issuer authorisation system. The chip technology and the EMV standard enable authorisation of a transaction based on certain parameters without communicating with the back office of the banks.

The operation offline is also extremely valuable when the banks experience specific peaks within a short time frame and they want to be able to downsize their processing infrastructure. “In Brazil there is another driver for the adoption of chip card technology because you have a huge amount of cards for food vouchers – national schemes where the company pays some untaxed money for food and the lunches of the employees,” says Chevrel. “That is another huge market in Brazil and a big driver of the offline operation. We are talking about millions and millions of transactions just within an hour and half per day. So if you are able to handle half of the transactions offline securely then your back office system and your whole infrastructure can be downsized considerably.”

Also the Latin American card issuers are developing strategies to address the unbanked and underserved market segments. EMV prepaid cards are designed to offer payment products to this market with applications like salary cards, remittances, social benefits and youth cards, among others.

Looking at migrant workers sending remittances back to their families, a migrant worker in the US, which is not yet a chip card area, can have an EMV card which resides with their family or whoever it is in the home country. They can transfer money to that chip card and ring-fence the amount of funds they want to be credited to that chip card in Mexico or wherever. This is also another way to integrate a large percentage of the world’s population that is still unbanked without increasing risk or fraud and at the same time increase the number of bank customers.