INTERNATIONAL BYTES

Bangkok Bank has appointed Corillian, a provider of e-finance software, to develop its Internet banking service.

Corillian will install its Voyager Internet banking platform at the bank. Voyager is a high-performance system that will allow the bank to handle large volumes of customer traffic in a personalized manner with portal access, financial management and one-to-one marketing tools. The platform also has the ability to provide constant updates and new features in response to market demands.

"We want to provide our customers with financial solutions that are flexible and that can expand and grow in line with their changing needs," said Chartsiri Sophonpanich, president of Bangkok Bank. "Our customers deserve world-class e-banking services."

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Sumitomo Mitsui Bank, Tokyo, has installed the Sierra System, a software package that helps support fixed income operations.

The bank, the result of the recent merger between Sumitomo Bank and Sakura Bank, chose Sierra System, which is produced by Wayne, Pa.-based FNX Limited, because of its cross product functionality and ability to handle large transaction volumes.

Another deciding factor in Sumitomo Mitsui's decision to launch Sierra Systems was its extensive risk analytics and bond pricing capabilities. The software includes four theoretical calculation methods for pricing bonds, allowing users to market bonds unique to the Japanese fixed income market.

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The Bank of Bermuda is about to go live with a trade capture system from SunGard Asset Management.

The SunGard system, which is ISO 7775 and 15022 compliant, will replace an older legacy system that was incapable of handling the increased trading volume at the $80 billion bank. According to Martin Lancaster, senior vice president and head of Global Operations at the Hamilton-based Bank of Bermuda, the institution does about 40,000 trades per month worldwide--a figure that is expected to increase as people in wealthy countries with strong pension funds live longer and perform more trades.

"Cross-border trades have just got to go up," Lancaster said. "The bank's strategy has been to buy rather than to build because it allows it to concentrate on core businesses and get a state of the art system in place quickly."

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e-MID S.p.A., Europe's electronic organized market for treasury products, has formed a strategic alliance with Reuters, and will offer an extended suite of trading instruments to European interbank money markets.

Reuters will use its Dealing 300 platform to host the e-MIDER Overnight Index Swaps trading system and the e-MID deposits trading system, which will allow clients to view both markets through a single screen and keyboard.

'We believe Reuters Dealing 300 is an excellent fit to e-Mid and e-MIDER both from a technological and marketing perspective," said Francesco Cesarini, chairman of UniCredito bank and president of e-MID. "It will allow us to fully seize the opportunities provided by the current trend towards screen-based multilateral matching for standardized, plain vanilla money market products."