The new platform will service 250 member banks and follows the initial agreement in October 2008 for the development of the new platform infrastructure.

Pr Francesco Cesarini, e-MID SIM S.p.A president, comments: "I am very satisfied by the start of trading on the new platform. To have developed this new environment between November and today is actually very fast when one considers the complexity of the project as well as our constant requirement for a high level of security on the electronic platform.

From the start we have shared with List the importance of building a market architecture combining reliability at all times with flexibility and openness for future developments. Specific attention has been given to automated debits/credits on the Eurozone gross settlement system's Target2 accounts for banks. These, even in the present state of the financial system, represent a turnover of about 4.5 billion Euros per day, with an additional 3 billion Euros daily traded on the platform, but settled outside our automatic settlement mechanism. We thank all our market members and their IT support for their collaboration during the stages of implementation and testing. We are convinced that this effort will be rewarded with functional and product innovations."

Enrico Dameri, president of List S.p.A., comments: "The conception and implementation of this new platform means List can offer cutting edge technological services for connecting to the international area of the market, the interbank trading and post-trading stages. It includes an automatic settlement service of operations on e-MID through an interface with Target2." In March 2009 List Group became a shareholder of e-MID SIM S.p.A., further reinforcing synergies between the two companies.

e-MID General Manager, Vincenzo Mioccio, adds: "This functionally richer platform meets the requirements of Treasuries and strengthens membership to our markets nationally as well as internationally. For instance, the 56 members of MIC (the Collateralized Interbank Market - managed in cooperation with the Bank of Italy) benefit from the new auto-matching functionality, which is particularly useful on an anonymous market like MIC, automatically matching quotes on the market."

New developments for MIC will allow each participant to control automatically and preventively usage of the security pool. This automation increases the efficiency and agility of collateral management used in liquidity operations on MIC. This protected and guaranteed venue allows Italian institutions, representing over 80% of the banking sector, to trade Euros on terms from one week to six months.

In the Eurozone, a lot of institutions and regulators alike ponder the need for a Europe-wide collateralized market as an additional source of financing to traditional ones available to banks. This increases the significance of the collaboration between e-MID and List towards more technologically sophisticated collateralized markets.