Reuters’ opening of its new product development centre in Beijing marks the completion of its plan to establish three major development and data operations centres in the region.

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Markit Group has opened an office in Singapore. The pricing, valuations and risk management data company has already opened an office in Tokyo. The Singapore office will be headed by David Crammond, and will be responsible for business development in the Asia/Pacific region outside of Japan. Crammond joins from ABN Amro, where he was head structured asset sales.

Trading Systems Associates has announced plans to open an office in Singapore. The London-based consulting firm, whose principals Nick Dutton and Henry Young have recently completed a trip to the financial centre, reckons Asia/Pacific will be “the place to be over the next decade.”

London-based Logicscope Realisations has forged a strategic alliance with Velocity Systems International, based in Adelaide, Australia, to bid for business together on a revenue-share basis and combine resources for 24-hour system support. Logicscope’s main products are TradeSTP, a post-deal notification system that delivers deal data from the FX trading environment to the counterparty’s back office. Velocity’s expertise is in trading systems development for the international treasury markets and related support services.

The People’s Bank of China’s China Foreign Exchange Trade System has gone live with a multi-bank portal built with Reuters. The platform, operated by the only entity licensed to trade foreign exchange in China, will be supported by 10 market-makers: ABN Amro, Bank of China, Bank of Montreal, Citic Industrial Bank, Citibank, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Industrial & Commercial Bank of China, ING and Royal Bank of Scotland. The system will start trading eight currency pairs: U.S. dollar against the euro, yen, Hong Kong dollar, sterling, Swiss franc, Australian dollar and Canadian dollar and euro against the yen. The system is based on Reuters’ Electronic Trading (RET) platform.

Markit Group is opening an office in Tokyo. The office will be headed by Katsumi Mizutani, who will also lead business development. He joins Markit from TD Securities, where he was managing director and head of credit derivatives structuring and customized solutions, based in Tokyo.

Dow Jones Newswires has launched real-time commentary and analysis of the interest-rate swaps and foreign-exchange options markets in G7 and Asia-Pacific countries. Dow Jones CommentaryPlus is aimed at the Asian marketplace. The service is available via Reuters, Bloomberg and dowjonesnews.com as a single product or in a package with the Dow Jones Economic Report.

Risk management system supplier Sophis has extended its Hong Kong representative office into a full-service office, and relocated to the IFC2 tower in Central Hong Kong. Together with the existing Tokyo office, the expanded Hong Kong office will act as the regional head office, providing services to such local clients as Bank of China International, Bank of East Asia, HSBC, Fortis, Descartes Investment Management, Barclays Capital, Calyon, WestLB and ING, and supporting business activities with a strong focus on the Great China region. The company has named former London-based staffer Corinne Grillet Asia-Pacific professional services managing director, with responsibility for day-to-day service operation. Grillet will partner with Luwei Shi, Asia-Pacific business development managing director, to help drive the business forward.

Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi (BTM) has gone live with Cognotec’s Market Rate Manager (MRM). The contribution system complements the Cognotec AutoDeal platform the Japanese bank deployed four years ago to provide automated trading capability to clients on the FX@BTM service and to provide automated pricing capability to the FXall multi-bank portal. BTM is using MRM to provide a single source of bank-specific market rates to various internal bank systems, in addition to the FX@BTM service and to FXall.

MetaBit has added access to the Nagoya Stock Exchange via its Market Liquidity Hub (MLH) liquidity pool. Clients will access NSE through MetaBit’s XiliX trading tool, with orders routed via a Japanese broker. Other exchanges already connected to the platform include Tokyo, Osaka and Jasdaq.

Xinhua Finance has named Jae Lie as chief operating officer. Lie was previously president of Asian operations for the Hong Kong-based company, which has been aggressively adding to its portfolio of financial information assets, which now include Market News International, among others. Lie reports to CEO Fredy Bush.

Japanese commodity trading house Mitsui & Co. has upgraded voice technology for its commodity trading and risk management operations in Tokyo. The firm has installed two BT ITS p31 switches, doubling its potential line and turret capability to up to 64 users. The new equipment replaces BT’s Type 27 System.

New Jersey-based portfolio management system vendor has expanded its Singapore office to meet the recent growth in demand within the Asia Pacific region. As part of the expansion, Princeton has named Eugene Goh Hock Khiam to its client support team; he joins from Straits Lion Asset Management. Princeton reports the addition of five new clients in Asia Pacific in the past few months, including two in Singapore and others in Malaysia, Hong Kong and Australia.

The Hong Kong office of ICAP PLC has become the first client of Kalahari’s new real-time bond and asset swap pricing system. The platform allows traders to price as many as 200 bonds and asset swaps simultaneously. ICAP was seeking to reduce the time it took to price large quantities of Asian Yankee/Eurobond issues, and to reprice each time the market moved. The new Kalahari system complements the company’s Kace pricing and analytics system, which is also used by ICAP.

Reuters last month won a number of Chinese contracts for its Kondor+ suite of risk systems. Bank of Shanghai has signed up to use the Kondor+ position-keeping and desktop analysis system to support its expanded derivatives trading activities. Guangdong Development Bank, a commercial bank in the South China region, has also chosen to use Reuters’ Kondor suite of risk and trade management solutions. The bank will use the Kondor+ front-office system and Kondor Global Limits, the integrated limit, credit and market risk management system. Finally, First Sino Bank, a Chinese joint venture bank, will use Kondor+ and Kondor Global Limits to handle its derivatives transactions. The wins follow the announcement in March of new China Banking Regulatory Commission (CRBC) requirements for tighter regulatory credit controls.

Westpac Banking Corp. of Australia has signed up for SunGard Trading & Risk Systems’ Credient platform to handle global credit limits. Credient will offer Westpac a database of credit information that will allow bank staff to monitor global exposures against limits and manage exceptions on a real-time basis.

Indonesia’s fifth largest bank, PT Bank Danamon, will implement Reuters Market Data System (RMDS) enterprisewide. The agreement includes 20 positions of Reuters’ 3000 Xtra and six positions of Reuters Dealing. Bank Danamon is 51%-owned by a consortium comprising Deutsche Bank – a big RMDS user – and the Singapore government’s investment arm, Temasek Holdings.

SingTel, a communications group, has launched a global news service for mobile phone users in Singapore. Under the deal, Reuters will supply its premier multimedia news content to SingTel. Meanwhile, Reuters has signed a contract with Yonhap News under which the Korean news agency will distribute Reuters’ news services to the general news media in Korea.

MetaBit has gone live with the first Japanese implementation of its XiliX multi-broker direct market access connectivity tool at an undisclosed hedge fund. XiliX is a FIX-enabled, broker-independent trading solution that provides scalable execution for real-time equities trading. The system features intelligent order routing and algorithmic trading including VWAP, pairs, long/short equities strategies and market depth trading that can be controlled manually or set to auto-trading modes.