HVB invests in equity trading with Front

Hypovereinsbank (HVB), the German private sector bank, has extended its agreement with Stockholm-based trading technology providers Front Capital Systems, an operating unit of SunGard Trading Systems. HVB will implement Front Arena globally for its equity trading, including position keeping, profit and loss and risk management. The system will also be extended to the majority of the bank's interest rate related trading.

HVB previously used Front Capital Systems' legacy products Optas for equity trading and Intas for interest rate trading. Following a competitive tender on the equity trading side, HVB selected Front Arena to replace Optas, according to Gavin Style, a sales director at Front.

Front Arena will provide HVB with a complete infrastructure for equity and equity derivatives trading and order management on multiple markets. Proprietary, sales and retail equity orders at HVB will be routed via the Front Arena internal market. Orders placed in the internal market can be matched either manually or automatically, thus providing a secondary market for over-the-counter products issued by the bank, or routed automatically to the exchanges.

The new solution, Front Arena, covers both equity and interest rate trading. Style says the Front Intas system is currently still in use on the interest rate trading side, but that HVB intends to move its interest rate trading over to Front Arena. A date for this has not yet been decided.

Eberhard Weidner, managing director and chief process manager at HVB, said Front is a potentially long-term partner of HVB globally. The use of Front Arena at HVB will now extend to over 600 users, split between Munich, London, Vienna, New York and Singapore.