The Tokyo Grain Exchange was facing a financial decline, and needed to merge its processing functions into the Tokyo Commodity Exchange (Tocom). The challenge was how all of the open positions (outstanding contracts) from the over 50 clearing members, could be converted by all of the members and transferred across to the Nasdaq OMX platform at Tocom, within the 90 minute gap in trading at the Tocom exchange.

There were alternative options that involved using multiple manual processes that could not be relied on across the many participants in the time available, or requesting expensive new functionality from the system vendor at the new exchange. The exchange was already aware of our solution, and how custom functionality could quickly be provided over the web, quickly and securely. They had also requested custom functionality from us before, and they were comfortable that we could deliver the solution in the scheduled that had already been committed to.

Touch-Fire built a user front end that all of the members would be able to use to allocate their positions, together with verification and exchange monitoring functionality to manage the process. A back end integration with the Nasdaq OMX clearing system was built to execute the transfer. Several dry runs took place with all members present, and the process was run for real, without any problems, on the last day of the year, 2010.

This project allowed the exchange to smoothly transition to the new platform.