WDR Installs Multi-Functional Keyboards From Wey Technologies For FX, Treasury

LONDON--Wey Technologies has installed its HK2000 multi-functional keyboard for approximately 150 treasury and foreign exchange trading positions at UBS' Warburg Dillon Read (WDR) branch in London; the hardware is already in use in more than 500 positions on WDR's interest rates floor.

WDR replaced standalone keyboards--some using Sun Microsystems' keyboard-sharing devices--with Wey's keyboards for the treasury group, located on Liverpool Street in the City of London. The treasury desks went live with the new keyboards in April this year while the interest rates department, at 1 Finsbury Avenue, went live in May 1998.

Sources at WDR say that the Wey keyboards were the simplest and most flexible solution. "Flexibility was the main selling point. You can connect virtually anything to it. There wasn't anything else like it on the market," says a source.

Traders now have an average of three 20-inch NEC 2000 or NEC 2010 flat panel screens on each desk. Wey's HK2000 keyboard allows users to control up to six workstations transparently, to share workstations with other users, and to help reduce market data feed costs, say sources.

On the interest rate trading desks, the keyboard integrates Reuters Dealing 2000, the EBS foreign exchange transaction system, Open Bloomberg and Reuters Selectfeed through Triarch. Traders with the Dealing products and EBS wanted to be able to access these services at all times, so the IT department installed two dedicated 15-inch Eizo flat panel screens on each FX trader's desk.

WDR's treasury group uses the Wey keyboard to integrate the Open Bloomberg feed, the Reuters Selectfeed through the Reuters Triarch 2000 digital data distribution platform and GL Trade's Liffe Connect transaction platform.

A typical desk incorporates Microsoft Windows NT, the Next Openstep interface specification, Triarch and Wey, says a spokesperson at Wey. WDR is re-writing proprietary applications, originally written for the Nextstep operating system (recently ported to Y2K-compliant Openstep) to Windows NT; the trading floors will eventually be all-NT, say sources.

Wey is now in discussions with WDR to replace the standalone keyboards in use by its equities division at Finsbury Avenue, and at various groups elsewhere in Europe. Wey already supplies keyboards to UBS in Lugano, Switzerland.