Integrated Solutions Create Seamless Trade Settlement to Meet Fiduciary Goals

MONTREAL, Quebec & TORONTO Ontario (January 22, 2009) - CanDeal, the leading online marketplace for Canadian debt securities, and Charles River Development, an award-winning provider of financial software and services to the global investment management community, are extending a strategic initiative that integrates the Charles River Investment Management System (Charles River IMS) and CanDeal marketplace to help Canadian buy-side firms address National Instrument 24-101 (NI 24-101) and other regulations by automating trade settlement.

NI 24-101 was introduced in 2007 by the Canadian Securities Administrators as a framework for ensuring more efficient and timely settlement processing of trades.  According to Jayson Horner, Co-founder and CEO of CanDeal, the integration with Charles River IMS is consistent with the spirit of the regulation and reflects its objectives in market practice. “Current market conditions point to an industry need for improved governance and efficiency in all aspects of the investment management process. Risk management has emerged as the industry’s top priority.  Our complementary solutions help fiduciaries evolve their compliance processes and adopt the highest standards of practice available.”

“We have a substantial Canadian client base of more than 20 buy-side firms and understand the unique requirements of this market,” says Tom Driscoll, Vice President, Sales and Marketing, Charles River Development. “Since the introduction of NI 24-101, the ability to facilitate same-day affirmation of trade results has been more important than ever for our Canadian clients. Charles River IMS automates the entire trade life cycle from portfolio management to settlement, helping clients gain efficiencies while reducing costly errors and failed trades.  The system’s integration with CanDeal meets our Canadian clients’ growing demand for enhanced trading tools and liquidity solutions to facilitate best execution.” Dale MacMaster, Director, Fixed Income at Alberta Investment Management Corporation says “the combination of these two market leaders into a single integrated solution has allowed AIMCo to exceed our fiduciary obligations to our clients.”

The integration of Charles River IMS and CanDeal’s marketplace creates a seamless end-to-end trade and trade processing solution that places best practices at the forefront -- defining the dealing environment, moving compliance upstream, facilitating superior price discovery and trade execution, crystallizing trades in comprehensive transaction records, and allowing for real-time risk measurement and assessment.  Notice of execution, allocation, instruction, trade matching, affirmation and settlement can all occur within seconds of a trade.

About CanDeal
CanDeal is the leading online marketplace for Canadian dollar debt securities (www.candeal.ca). CanDeal provides online access to the largest pool of liquidity for Canadian government bonds and money market instruments. CanDeal’s marketplace is available to institutional investors in Canada, the United States and Europe.

CanDeal offers Canadian institutional investors and investment dealers online access to liquidity in 15 debt and derivative marketplaces operated by Tradeweb in the United States, Europe and Asia.

About Charles River Development
Charles River Development is an award-winning provider of technology systems and services to over 310 investment firms in the institutional, mutual fund, banking, hedge fund, wealth management, insurance and pension industries. The Charles River Investment Management System is a comprehensive front- and middle-office software suite for all asset classes that includes: Charles River Manager for portfolio management and modeling; Charles River Trader for order management and electronic trading; Charles River Compliance for real-time pre-trade and end-of-day compliance; and Charles River Post-Trade for the centralized management of trade matching, confirmation, and settlement workflow.  The system incorporates global real-time electronic trading via FIX (Financial Information eXchange) through the Charles River Network, a broker-neutral financial network that is fully integrated with Charles River IMS.

Charles River IMS features a modern, proven, N-Tier service oriented architecture (SOA) that is highly scalable and supports continuous 24x7 operations. Message-based APIs and exposed Web Services facilitate rapid systems integration.

The company also offers implementation and managed services (hosted and remote application management).  Founded in 1984, Charles River maintains headquarters in Boston and primary offices in London, Melbourne, New York, Paris, Singapore and Tokyo.