Lawyers acting on behalf of failed industry consortium GSTPA have opened the bidding on the technology assets of the bankrupt post-trade processing utility.
Interested parties are being invited to contact the Zurich office of law firm Buergi & Naegeli to register their interest in an outright purchase of the GSTPA's Transaction Flow Manager central matching engine or other intellectual assets relating to post-trade processing formats and patents.
The industry-backed GSTPA was forced into administration in November 2002 when shareholders refused to stump up further funding for the venture which was competing to develop a post-trade processing hub for cross-border securities dealing.
SIS Swiss Financial Services, which took a Sfr40 million hit against the failure of the GSTPA in its 2002 accounts, claims to retain licensing rights to the TFM technology which it insists will remain in force should the intellectual property rights be sold to a third party. SIS owns a 70% stake in AccuMatch, the company set up with partners Swift and Technosoft/Tata, to consolidate their rights to the TFM platform when the original axion4 consortium was relieved of duties by the GSTP ahead of the go-live date in September 2002.