US/EUROPE - Global straight through processing (STP) company, Omgeo has announced the timetable for the roll out of its institutional trade processing services.

By the third quarter of next year, a single workflow solution for domestic and cross-border transactions, relying on a single database should be in place, says Kevin Milne, executive managing director of the company, based in London.

Continental Europe is the company’s strongest growth area, and beta testing of a centralised non-US cross-border matching system will start in August, says Richard Hughes, managing director for Europe, Middle East and Asia (EMEA) at the firm.

Apart from the UK, Italy is currently the main source of the trade manager’s new clients in Europe and it is hoping to open new offices in Milan, as well as Madrid and Johannesburg, by the end of the year.
The company says it is adding around 30 new European customers to its roster every month, including mainly Dutch, French, German, Spanish and Swedish investment managers. This year, 60% of its new EMEA clients are from Europe, excluding UK, says Hughes.

Omgeo believes that the main problems concerning global automated STP are not those involving the speeding up of vendor/buyer matching, but those created by information management. Says Milne: “ If you automate it transaction_processing the key isn’t speed, it’s the quality of the data: 80% of failed transactions are caused by wrong data.
“The trick isn’t to fail quicker, it is to close more trades.”

The existing European offices of Omgeo are in Edinburgh, Frankfurt, London, Paris and Stockholm. The company has 6,000 clients in 40 countries worldwide and it processes 700,000 transactions a day on their behalf.