At the same time Clearstream will offer same day currency deadlines for major Asia Pacific currencies such as the Australian Dollars, New Zealand Dollars, Hong Kong Dollars, Singapore Dollars and Japanese Yen.

Currently due to time zone differences, Asia Pacific customers have to pre-fund or finance their settlement operations. Same day payment deadlines will provide customers with a settlement solution as efficient as they enjoy in US Dollars, Euros and other major currencies and will materially reduce their funding costs. As part of this plan, Clearstream will reposition its operational support to the market to ensure that payment, credit and settlement operations can be efficiently conducted throughout the Asian operational day.

The enhancements planned for the Asian operating day will be developed throughout 2009 and follow the launch of its new generation processing environment last March. Clearstream delivers instruction deadlines in core European and American markets of 15 minutes to market and settlement of same day domestic trades on the domestic market within 15 minutes of instruction receipt.

Clearstream treats all the steps of the transaction life cycle. The scope of services benefiting from the new environment include not only settlement itself, but also instruction validation, matching, domestic market instruction handling and feedback, instruction sequencing, provisioning, collateral allocation and substitution and customer reporting. These changes will enable Clearstream to significantly strengthen its commitment to the Asia Pacific markets. Clearstream has been present in Asia Pacific since 1992 with offices in Hong Kong and Dubai. In 2007, Clearstream opened offices in Singapore and Tokyo.

Philippe Metoudi, Member of the Executive Board, responsible for Relationship Management for Asia-Pacific, Middle East and Africa said: "This is a natural progression in our servicing of our Asia Pacific customer base and supporting their regional cross border settlement needs. In 2007, we opened new offices in Singapore and Tokyo to support Clearstream's long standing presence in Hong Kong. We are now backing up our investment in customer service with processing solutions that support customers' same day settlement and funding needs."

Mark Gem, Member of the Executive Board, responsible for Business Management added: "Ours is a global business. Having realised and executed with success our objectives in Europe our next focus is on delivering equivalent service levels to our customers in the Asian domestic markets. Our vision for interoperability is to provide our customers with the ability to settle against counterparties globally, irrespective of trading and custody location, as efficiently as if those counterparties were internal."