Deutsche Börse/Eurex Successfully Completes First Year-2000 Overall Simulation

Deutsche Börse/Eurex has successfully completed the first overall simulation of its systems with members and business partners in the framework of its Year 2000 preparations. The company made the announcement on Monday July 5. According to Dr. Michael Kuhn, chief IT officer of Deutsche Börse AG, no errors relevant to the Year 2000 occurred. "We are benefiting from the experience that we gained from the euro changeover. The Year 2000 preparations not only allowed us to get the systems ready for the millennium change but also to optimize them further," Kuhn said. During the first overall simulation, all relevant trading, settlement and information systems of the Deutsche Börse Group/Eurex were simulated with respect to the date change. The purpose of the overall simulation was to identify and eliminate any potential sources of error in the run-up to the date change. The simulation was run parallel to regular exchange trading operations from May 10 to June 30. The simulation has met the high expectations. Taking part in the tests were 336 domestic and 193 foreign market participants of Deutsche Börse Group/Eurex. The tests were run for the Xetra and BOSS/BOEGA (order-routing and settlement data) systems for the cash market, Eurex for the derivatives market, CASCADE and OLGA for the clearing and settlement of securities transactions and Ticker Plant Frankfurt (TPF) for the calculation of the indices and the transmission of price, rate and turnover information from the trading systems. The preparation for the date change of Deutsche Börse/Eurex are being made in three stages. In the first stage, which ran until the end of 1998, the systems were inspected for their Year 2000 conformity and were corrected if necessary. In a second step, complete business processes within the Deutsche Börse Group/Eurex corporation were tested. In this phase, the effects of the date change on individual sequences within the corporation were checked. This part of the project was successfully completed at the end of April 1999. During the third phase, the Overall Simulation, typical stock-exchange transactions were carried out jointly with the customers with regard to the date change.