Macquarie Telecom secures daily bond trading worth up to $500 million

Dedicated hosting solution helps Yieldbroker meet ASIC's stringent security and compliance requirements
 

Sydney, Australia – 8 September 2005 – Australia's only licensed fixed income trading portal, Yieldbroker, has signed Macquarie Telecom to help it meet stringent security and regulatory requirements in accordance with Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC).

Yieldbroker operates a licensed financial market in the form of a web-based trading system for fund managers. Owned by institutional banks including ABN Amro, Deutsche Bank and Citigroup, Yieldbroker is a business-to-business equivalent of the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) for the local wholesale fixed income market. Fund managers log-on to the site to trade various types of bonds – the average trade has an approximate value of $10 million.

Richard Swift, Operations Manager, Yieldbroker said, “Recent changes to the Corporations Act mean our technology and security resources are assessed by ASIC on an annual basis. We now face the same regulatory requirements in these areas as the ASX and Sydney Futures Exchange.”

“Yieldbroker did not have all the internal resources or systems to meet these demands so we needed to chose a vendor who could ensure we met our responsibilities,” said Swift.

“Macquarie Telecom is a name we can trust. It has a proven track record helping federal government agencies meet their regulatory and security requirements. And the security certifications it has achieved – namely AS/NZS 7799 and DSD Gateway – mean we can turn to our regulator and say, ‘Our data centre provider is accredited to industry best practice,'” he said.

Managed Security Services to mitigate risk

Given the value of the trades running across the system and the strict regulatory requirements, even the smallest breach of security could result in:

• Disruption of hundreds of millions of dollars of financial transactions
• Possible prosecution under the Corporations Act
• Substantial reputation damage

Macquarie Telecom and Yieldbroker worked closely to design a new server and security architecture that will help the company mitigate risk. The result is a complex managed hosting solution that includes:

• 9 dedicated servers, running both Windows 2003 and Red Hat Linux
• Fully fail-over networking switches and firewalls
• Managed Security Services including Intrusion Detection Systems
• Full Managed Backup Services
• Detailed monthly and quarterly security management reporting
  

The solution is designed to provide 99.9 per cent availability, with every device highly redundant and mirrored. This is to ensure there is no disruption to trading as a result of component failure. Should Yieldbroker's site go down, unexplained, for an extended period of time, the company could face further regulatory scrutiny.

“The impact of non-compliance for Yieldbroker is significant,” said Greg Thomson, General Manager Hosting and Security, Macquarie Telecom. “They are a unique company in Australia and therefore have unique requirements, but at the end of the day it is the accountability that matters most.”

“For Yieldbroker, Macquarie Telecom is much more than an infrastructure provider: we are an independent third party that ensures all the systems and processes are in place to help it meet its regulatory requirements.”

Individually tailored reporting to meet regulatory guidelines

“One of the key elements of the Corporations Act is to run an orderly market,” said Swift.

“For Yieldbroker to achieve this, we need a comprehensive reporting service that can provide a detailed insight into how the system performs over the month. It has to cover everything from patching through to incident management, routine maintenance and infrastructure recommendations so our audit committee, board, stakeholders and even ASIC have complete visibility into system,” he said.

Included in the Managed Hosting agreement, Macquarie Telecom delivers Yieldbroker a comprehensive monthly and quarterly report. Yieldbroker also uses Macquarie's network management and reporting tool, InView for day to day management of its systems. The web-based monitoring tool gives Yieldbroker total visibility across its technical facilities.

“InView is robust enough to report on memory usage, disc usage or general network usage at any time over any period. At the same time, Macquarie can deliver the complex reporting that is required for our quarterly and annual audits,” said Swift. 

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For more information:
Mandy Galmes
N2N Communications
02 9213 2302
agalmes@n2n.com.au

About Macquarie Telecom
Macquarie Telecom is a leading supplier of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) solutions – including voice, data, mobile and hosting – specialising in the business and government markets. The world class Intellicentre facility offers state-of-the-art hosting and security solutions. The Intellicentre is certified to AS 7799 and DSD Gateway security standards.

Macquarie Telecom provides services to more than 2,500 of the top companies in Australia and Asia, supporting more than one million business users at work every day. Founded in July 1992, it is one of Australasia's first deregulated telecommunications companies. It expanded its operation into Asia in 2000, and holds carrier licences in Australia, Singapore and Hong Kong.