Brokers will be able to offer clients trading access to 5000 UK and international equities, via an interface to Winner, the automated dealing system provided by Winterflood Securities.

Tarot has also been modified to cater for cross-border trading across time zones. If a client in the UK commits to buying shares in a different time zone, the date of the order will automatically be changed to the time zone in which the transaction will take place.

Tarot's corporate actions module has also been upgraded to accommodate a higher volume of processing capability. The new system will enable parallel processing of holding extracts, entitlement calculations, entitlement releases and separation of entitlement calculations for dividend and corporate actions. Clients or fund managers will be notified of outstanding events by e-mail, and will be able to make elections via the Internet. Users can also set up a systematic process for dealing irregular corporate actions using rules based definitions.

Wilco also updated progress on its new high-volume corporate actions system, which is currently being beta tested with a global investment bank, with live running scheduled for Q2 2002. The new system is the first component to be based on Wilco's Java-based platform. It will support a broad range of corporate action events, says the vendor, including mandatory benefits and reorg events such as bonus issues, stock splits and advice only events; voluntary events including calls and conversions; tax and income events such as fixed and floating rate coupons and dividends; as well as more complex events such as subscription events and take-over events.

In a separate announcement, Wilco has launched a new product for interfacing host settlement systems with the Japan Securities Depository Centre's (Jasdec) pre-settlement matching system for automated trade and settlement matching. The Jasdec Matching Adapter will initially be for Japanese domestic equities trading.