Disasters come in many shapes and sizes but if they stop vital normal work from proceeding, very little incidents can still qualify. A remarkably large number of financial dealing rooms are situated right above main railway stations in London – so terribly convenient for our staff, don’t you know – and so it is that on the morning of Budget Day – quite an important event in the financial calendar – this month, dealers from Shearson Lehman, UBS Phillips & Drew, County NatWest, Save & Prosper and Mitsui Taiyo Kobe were to be seen milling around in the street outside the Broadgate development over Liverpool Street station in the City, emphatically not dealing. The problem was that terrorists from the self-styled Irish Republican Army have taken to targeting London railway stations, and have quickly discovered that they can cause vast disruption to commerce by committing murder and mayhem with two or three real bombs, interspersed over a period with scores of telephoned warnings to the authorities or the media that turn out to be hoaxes. It therefore seems clear, given their exposed location, that all those dealers need somewhere to dash and continue to do their thing in the likely event of further bomb scares – at least that’s what Telehouse International Corp of Europe Ltd, out in the wastes of Docklands believes, and it commissioned a survey of banks, brokers and money market operators by Continental Research to find out whether they would be prepared to pay for insurance in the form of an emergency dealing room equipped with screens and worldwide telecommunications links. The survey found that the average anticipated loss of trading capability per day worked out at UKP79,000, UKP138,000 a day for those with 150 or more dealers. Of the respondents, 27% had suffered one or more dealing interruptions of an hour or more in the previous 12 months, and of that 27%, the average number of interruptions was 3.4, hitting an average of 22 desks. Yet Continental Research found that only 15% appeared to have solid contingency plans, with 4% having reciprocal arrangements with another company and 11% planning to move their dealers to another part of the company, although even of these, it seems that some did not have space prepared. Another 15% hadn’t even thought about it, 15% had thought about it but done nothing. As 49% of the respondents agreed that a standby dealing room would be the ideal contingency plan, Telehouse is now conducting a feasibility study into establishing a fully-equipped room with about 20 positions to start with, which could be in place by year-end. David Liddle, co-founder of Metaphor Computer Systems Inc and an alumnus of Xerox Corp’s Palo Alto Research Centre, has resigned from IBM Corp, which he joined when IBM acquired Metaphor: he had been the front-runner to head IBM’s Taligent Inc joint venture with Apple Computer Inc but withdrew his name earlier this year when according to the Wall Street Journal, Apple engineers made it clear he would not have the degree of control he thought he needed; IBM is believed to have tried to persuade him to stay on in some other capacity, but he says he wants to branch out in a new technology direction with a new – presumably start-up – company.
