The Thomson Order Routing community is one of the largest electronic trading communities in the world. With well over 1 billion shares traded per day and over 5,000 connections globally, the Thomson Order Routing community includes the world's leading brokerages, banking institutions, assets managers and hedge funds. It is also the largest global hub and spoke network, connecting traders across continents and time zones to any trading partner and venue. The order routing service is both market and broker-neutral, transferring industry-standard order and execution FIX messages, between institutional and broker trading partners.

The IRESS IOS network is a domestic order routing network that connects to over 40 brokers in Australia and New Zealand, allowing direct access to the ASX, Click, SFE, and NZX exchanges.

Dan Kramer, Global Managing Director, Institutional Equities, Thomson Financial commented: "We look forward to working with IRESS, the recognized trading technology leader in Australia and New Zealand. Through this relationship, we give our customers immediate access to these markets and bring IRESS's customers alternative sources of liquidity and a chance to grow their business by coming on to the Thomson Order Routing network."

Peter Dunai, Managing Director, IRESS said: "IRESS is pleased to have reached agreement with Thomson Financial to connect our respective networks. This relationship will enable our Australian IOS clients to seamlessly receive order flow from the Thomson Order Routing network into their existing IRESS order management and execution infrastructure. It is consistent with our aim to provide a fully open environment supporting industry standard protocols and connectivity with major international vendor networks."

Thomson Financial's solutions for the equity professional support the entire trading workflow - from market awareness, analytics and research and liquidity discovery through Thomson ONE and Thomson AutEx, to order delivery though the Thomson Order Routing network, as well as trade analysis through Thomson Transaction Analysis. Thomson enables the buy-side to identify trading opportunities, achieve best execution and minimize market impact. Additionally, Thomson enables the sell-side to maximize trade volumes and better serve its customers.


Separately, Thomson Financial today announced the launch of Thomson CAPITAL ASP, an outsourced global settlement solution for Institutional Stockbrokers and Investment Banks, designed to meet users' workflow requirements.

Thomson CAPITAL ASP addresses the needs of international organisations settling fixed income, equity, treasury, and derivative products globally. As a hosted solution, Thomson CAPITAL ASP offers clients improved economies of scale through a highly automated process, which allows clients to draw on the benefits of a variable cost pricing model and one-stop support. Thomson CAPITAL ASP is an integrated solution, which leverages content and services drawn from across TF's vast global reference library.

Peter Hald, European Managing Director, Thomson Transaction Services commented: "We have changed the game by reinventing an institutional settlement system to leverage new technologies and innovation in terms of application, design, and functionality. Thomson CAPITAL ASP allows clients to benefit from enhanced economies of scale through a variable cost model while improving control of their business without the need to invest in costly infrastructure. The Thomson CAPITAL ASP model is consistent with Thomson BETAHost in the US, a market-leading outsourced offering which allows hundreds of Investment Banks and Brokers to process millions of transactions each day."

Several clients have already signed for Thomson CAPITAL ASP and Thomson Financial anticipates the first customer will be live on the outsourced solution in the last quarter of 2006.

Key features of the CAPITAL ASP Service include:

• Comprehensive back office solution including automated Corporate Actions and Stock Borrowing
• Flexible SWIFT 15022 messaging engine
• Single Settlement Engine ready Interface with CREST for UK settlement
• Multi-asset class processing and support
• Integrated General Ledger Inclusive of a Thomson Global Stock Master file for daily stock and price updates
• Interfaces to leading order management systems
• Hosted in secure and resilient Thomson Financial Data Centres
• Provided on dedicated IBM host servers across two sites
• Disaster recovery service

The launch of Thomson CAPITAL ASP follows the completion of a major investment to broaden the scope of Thomson CAPITAL's settlement processing.