5th September, 2006
Investec goes live with the Fidessa® algorithmic tools

LONDON – 5 September 2006 – royalblue (LSE:RYB), provider of Fidessa, today announced that Investec Securities (UK) has gone live with Fidessa’s Pairs and VWAP algorithmic trading modules. Investec, a specialist banking group providing financial services in the London, South African and Australian markets, already uses Fidessa as its equity trading platform.

Investec is using Fidessa’s Pairs trading tool to enable its traders to work on complex pair orders based on M&A, historical ratios or their own in-house models. The VWAP module supports VWAP, TWAP and Random Slice order slicing mechanisms and allows traders to customise levels of aggression and slice intervals. Both these tools provide improved efficiency for the business by allowing traders to handle a greater volume of algorithmic orders and focus their time on more complex trades.

Fidessa provides a comprehensive order management system with integrated market data and low latency exchange connectivity which interfaces with Investec’s internal back-office system, facilitating real-time STP processing of all trades.

Trevor Gatfield of Investec Securities (UK), comments: “We wanted algorithmic trading capabilities to reduce the cost of trading complex order types and guarantee best execution for our clients. Fidessa provided the best product for meeting these needs and also allowed us to leverage our existing investment in the platform. The integrated solution that Fidessa supplies also means we didn’t have to glue together solutions from different vendors.”

The implementation was successfully achieved in one month as Investec needed only to extend its existing Fidessa system without changing any infrastructure or the back-office interfaces. The algorithmic modules are installed in London for users on the securities desk.

The VWAP and Pairs trading modules form part of Fidessa’s algorithmic trading suite. Other modules available include list management and wave trading for supporting basket/program trading.

Philip Slavin, head of European product marketing at Fidessa comments: “We are delighted to extend our partnership with Investec into our algorithmic trading offerings. As with our multi-asset capabilities, we chose to extend and build our algorithmic trading services within our own architecture in order to ensure that we end up with a totally integrated, high performance, resilient and low latency solution.”

The Fidessa product suite provides integrated multi-asset trading, market data and connectivity to over 750 buy-side institutions, 170 brokers and 68 exchanges, and is used by over 85% of global, tier-one equity brokers. Fidessa serves over 9,000 users at over 260 clients around the world.

Investec
Investec is an international specialist banking group that provides a diverse range of financial products and services to a niche client base in three principal markets, the United Kingdom, South Africa and Australia as well as certain other countries. The group was established in 1974 and currently has approximately 4 000 employees.

Investec focuses on delivering distinctive profitable solutions for its clients in five core areas of activity namely, Private Client Activities, Treasury and Specialised Finance, Investment Banking, Asset Management and Property Investment Banking.

In July 2002 the Investec group implemented a dual listed company structure with listings on the London and Johannesburg Stock Exchanges. Management and staff own approximately 20% of the equity share capital of the group.

At 18 May 2006, total shareholders’ equity was £1.2 billion, third party assets under management were £54.4billion and core loans and advances were £9.6 billion. The combined group’s current market capitalisation is approximately £2.0 billion.

Fidessa group is a world-leading supplier of multi-asset trading, portfolio analysis, decision support, investment compliance, market data and global connectivity solutions for both the buy-side and sell-side globally. Available as a simple workstation or as an integrated application suite, the Fidessa and Fidessa LatentZero products are built on the clear vision of providing the richest functionality, coverage and distribution to the financial markets community.

The Fidessa suite is used by 85% of tier-one, global equity brokers providing sophisticated multi-asset trading, market data, order management and execution capabilities to all tiers of the sell-side.

The Fidessa LatentZero suite is used by the world’s largest asset management firms through to smaller specialist managers and hedge funds, and provides comprehensive portfolio analysis, real-time P&L, what-if analysis, investment compliance, order and execution management, and post trade processing tools, across all asset classes, to all tiers of the buy-side.

Fidessa’s global network carries over 130 million messages a month covering DMA, Care and Algorithmic orders, Indications of Interest and FIX Allocations between over 1,800 buy-sides and 310 brokers across 100 markets worldwide.

Head-quartered in London and with offices in New York, Boston, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Paris, Toronto and San Francisco, Fidessa group serves 22,000 users across 600 clients globally. Fidessa group was founded in 1981, has revenues of around US$350m, employs over 1,200 people and has been fully listed (LSE:FDSA) since 1997.

For further information, please contact:

Alastair Turner
Aspectus PR (PR Agency)
+44 (0) 20 7487 8443
alastair@aspectuspr.co.uk

Fidessa® is a registered trademark of Fidessa Group plc
All product and company names herein may be trademarks of their registered owners.

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