The system is live at WestLB's London office where it is being used to disseminate real-time prices to Bloomberg and Reuters as well as at the bank's Düsseldorf operations where it is managing proce contributions to Bloomberg.

Future plans include the roll-out of prices to Reuters in Düsseldorf and real-time prices contributions to other vendors such as Telerate.

The Gissing software takes the data from the different input sources at WestLB and maps it to the relevant internal or vendor destinations. Previously new instruments or data had to be updated manually which meant WestLB's prices were indicative and not tradeable. But from January 2005 traders, mainly in the fixed income and credit departments, will be able to enter market prices directly using ConteX MCS.

Richard Gissing, CTO, Gissing Software, adds: "Being able to issue real-time prices quickly and effectively was vital to WestLB's data strategy and one of the reasons it chose ConteX MCS."

Alexandra Balloff, global head of market data management, WestLB, says: "With ConteX MCS, we can issue real-time prices and easily contribute prices on new instruments. We expect to increase the volume of our contributions by as much as 50% by the end of 2005."

The bank can now also use real-time prices routed through ConteX MCS for risk management. WestLB can route the data to the back office and match its own real-time prices against Bloomberg or Reuters prices for mark to market P&L.

The vendor says ConteX MCS is set up on separate servers at WestLB's London and Düsseldorf disaster recovery sites and there is instant switch-over to ensure continuity of contributions in the event of a failure.