Swiss bankruptcy lawyers have finally invited tenders for the assets of defunct trade processing utility GSTP, 15 months after the industry-owned Association was wound up by its backers.
The Zurich-based administrators have invited interested parties to make a formal bid for the intellectual property rights to GSTP's Transaction Flow Manager, consisting of US and European patents and trademarks, documentation, and software including a test engine, and single and multi-user workstation gateways.
Preliminary bids are invited by 7 March, with a deadline for final submissions a month later.
The GSTP - which was competing with the Thomson/DTCC joint venture Omgeo to build critical mass for its virtual matching utility - was shut down in November 2002, barely two months after processing the first live trades through the TFM. The vote to wind up the company came as the GSTP's 41 industry backers shied away from further funding of the venture in the absence of any firm support from the asset management community.
The company's creditors have been frustrated at the slow pace of bankruptcy proceedings, which have been hamstrung by wrangles over ownership of the intellectual property rights to the TFM and by the effort involved in collecting and collating the distributed software, which was housed at multiple sites.
In the interim, Omgeo's stranglehold on the market has tightened while the central trade matching debate has moved on, making initial valuations of $20-$30 million for the TFM seem hopelessly unrealistic.