Strong Growth At Clearstream For September 2004

Clearstream’s core business figures showed further growth levels in September 2004. The number of international transactions processed by Clearstream rose to 12.8 million year to date September 2004, an increase of 4.6 percent year on year (January to September 2003: 12.2 million). 18 percent of these transactions are registered as stock exchange transactions, 82 percent as Over the Counter (OTC) transactions. The introduction of the equity central counterparty in March 2003 continues to result in efficiency gains that affect domestic transactions. As expected, the corresponding number for domestic transactions decreased by 30.9 percent from 36.1 million in 2003 to 24.9 million year to date 2004 with a ratio of 66 percent stock exchange transactions to 34 percent OTC transactions.

The value of assets held in custody on behalf of customers rose to approximately EUR 7.4 trillion, a rise of 1.8 percent from the same month last year. The breakdown of this growth shows advances of 9.4 percent for international assets and declines of 3.3 percent for domestic assets.

In other business areas, Clearstream’s CreationOnline real-time information service continued to grow rapidly with customer interactions reaching a new record level of 1.6 million during September, representing an increase of 33 percent from the previous month. The number of registered users of CreationOnline increased last month by 1,009 to reach a total of 14,325 across 77 countries.

Another core business area for Clearstream is the Global Securities Financing services which have shown further growth. The combined services include tripartite repo, securities lending and collateral management and for September 2004 the average of collateral under management amounted to EUR 130 billion representing a rise of 27 percent from the same month last year (September 2003: EUR 102 billion).

Clearstream’s investment funds service showed further volume increases with the number of investment funds related instructions processed reaching over 124,200 in September 2004, a rise of 7 percent from the same month last year (September 2003: 116,000).