Welcome to Streetwise, our newsletter for clients, partners and industry participants. In this winter 2009 edition we feature some of the recent exciting projects our clients and partners have engaged with, plus client events and the latest Wall Street Systems (Wallstreet) activities and news.

In 2009, our priority has been to better support our clients during these turbulent and challenging times. To ensure our solutions and services meet our clients’ needs we have increased the emphasis on our Client Engagement Program, delivering 15 User Groups and three Affinity Groups which were attended by 300 client representatives from 148 companies across 10 cities worldwide.

As part of the program, we were pleased to host the inaugural GBS/Atlas (formerly Aleri Global Banking) User Group, including a one day workshop dedicated to SWIFT 2009 and the XML strategy. We continued to develop the User Groups for Wallstreet Suite clients, and the Upgrade to v7 of the product was one of the key topics of discussion. Wallstreet also launched the Open Reporting Database (ORD) and Corporate Treasurers’ Dashboards functionality. Clients benefited from the planning session where they were able to discuss in an open forum commonalities of system usage and to have the opportunity to share their knowledge to gain the greatest benefit from their treasury management system.

Wallstreet initiated the Government sector User Groups which were well attended by our clients from the Central Bank and Debt Management Office sector. The Phase II launch of Wallstreet FX and Wallstreet BackOffice was premiered at the recent APAC User Group in Singapore, and the Wallstreet Treasury User Group expanded to the Americas for the first time, with discussions focusing on the theme of Treasury Transformation.

We will be expanding the User Group and Affinity Forum programme for 2010. Please visit the Wallstreet Client Extranet regularly for the latest schedule.

The Wallstreet Client Extranet was launched earlier this year, and I am pleased to report we now have 281 users from 99 client organisations, with new registrations every week. The site was initially launched to clients of Wallstreet FX and Wallstreet Suite; it will soon be rolled out to Wallstreet Treasury clients. The Wallstreet Client Extranet contains product roadmaps, user and installation guides, release notes, training information, plus presentations and content from the User Groups, forthcoming event information and dedicated private pages for individual client projects. We will be adding documentation and new information throughout 2010. If you haven’t yet registered I encourage you to contact your Account Manager for log-in details.

In 2009 we have worked with both long standing and new clients on some notable projects. Many of our clients have transitioned to ASP delivery, and Procter and Gamble marked their one year anniversary of running their global treasury operation via ASP with a gift of a wonderful celebratory cake! We thank all at P&G for such a generous (and delicious) gift.

Regions Bank, our first client for The Electronic Settlement Network (Wallstreet ESN) went live in exactly 5 months. Regions Bank is one of the largest full-service providers of consumer and commercial banking. They selected Wallstreet ESN, the newly launched post trade processing utility for the capital markets earlier this year. The rapid delivery and go-live of this project highlights the benefit and ease of deployment of the new hosted system. We believe it signals an important change within the FX and Cash markets.

We are proud to have signed new projects with the Central Bank of Oman and the National Bank of Slovakia, and we look forward to working closely with these organisations going forward. In 2009 we have also marked the 20 year anniversary of working with Unicredit Bank Austria, and 15 years with Bank of Estonia. We thank these clients for their continued patronage and look forward to serving them for many more years to come.

Wall Street Systems continues to strive to improve processes and our relationship with our clients. Since the beginning of 2009, when we introduced the Wallstreet Response System (WRS) Incident Surveys, we can confirm our response rate has grown steadily and reflects a very positive outlook on how we respond to incidents. A recent survey asked for ratings for overall satisfaction. This showed an 86% positive overall rating with 87% positive responses on our Timeliness, and 93% positive responses on the Level of Knowledge of our Client Services Staff.

Wall Street Systems continues to be financially strong, closing the 2009 year end with approximately $150m revenues. We have had a record year to achieve this, touching over 119 projects. We have carefully managed expenses and have undertaken only projects which are aligned to our core focus business areas.

Looking ahead to the remainder of the year and into next year, we will continue to focus on providing our clients with solutions they can rely on during these times of market change. We thank our staff for their dedication and again we would like to thank all our clients for their trust and continued commitment. We look forward to working closely with you and making 2010 a successful year.

Feedback or suggestions for topics you would like to see in Streetwise are always welcome!