From July, four dealers and four inter-dealer brokers will use it to electronically confirm their trades. A handful of dealers are already teed up to go live soon after. This is the first time any service of this kind has been offered to the Japanese equities market.

SwapsWire captures, verifies and confirms deals on-screen within minutes of execution, removing the need for manual processing of paper contracts. As well as the reduction in processing cost, confirmation on trade date (T+0) means a significant reduction in operational risk. SwapsWire is already used by dealers, inter-dealer brokers and buy-side clients in Europe, the U.S.A. and Asia for other OTC derivative products including interest rate and credit derivatives.

The system supports new trade and trade-life cycle events including amendments, increases and decreases, terminations, exercises, assignments and corporate actions.

Olaf Kasten, BNP Paribas' Head of Trading, Equities and Derivatives Japan, said, "BNP Paribas has been an active participant in the development of the SwapsWire service for Equity Options. We use the system extensively for our European OTC equity business and have realised significant operational efficiencies and virtually eliminated confirmation risk. We are happy to now be able to start using the system in Japan."

"We like the fact that all parties to the trade - the inter-dealer broker and both traders - will confirm the trade details from a single record within minutes of execution and that the broker confirmation, the trader's confirmation and our own trade capture can be achieved with a single click," he continued.

Masato Kawamura, President, Central Tanshi Securities Co., Ltd., said, "We are pleased to be participating in this new initiative because we think it will revolutionize the market. The introduction of an online confirmation service will reduce the human errors tremendously, and especially in the growing OTC equity market, it will help us to be more efficient in providing services to our clients."

Chip Carver, SwapsWire's CEO, said, "Japan has always been an important strategic market for us. We are delighted that we have eight market leaders ready to go live with this service. It validates our business plan and proves the solid nature of our product. Our Interest Rate Service has been well received and we expect the business to also grow rapidly in the equity market judging from the number of early takeups of the service. We will continue to build on our success here by expanding both our presence and the services we offer."