Recommendation 1 Recommendation 2 Recommendation 3 Recommendation 4

Recommendation 5 Recommendation 6 Recommendation 7 Recommendation 8

Market selection

Recommendation 2

Securities Systems must allow the option of network access on an interactive basis. They should cope with peak capacity without any service degradation, and have sufficient standby capabilities to recover operations in a reasonably short period within each processing day.

1.	How often, over the last twelve months, has the depository been required to:
	Change its published settlement timetable?	The timetable is varied from time to time to allow for market needs, generally in response to operating difficulties affecting a particular customer. There has been no major timetable disruption over the last twelve months.
	Extend the time of opening for settlement input by users?	CREST has not postponed the start of input in the last year, but has kept input open till later (with pre-advice) to allow customers to deal with their own internal processing delays on several occasions in early 2000.
	Delay start of day processing?	Start of day has been delayed on two occasions in the last 12 months, the maximum delay being 20 minutes. Because of the real time nature of settlement this delay was unseen by members and had no subsequent impact on the daily timetable.
2.	Does the depository operate real time or multiple batch processing for settlement?	The depository states that it operates in real time although in practice it operates around 600 multiple short batches of approximately a minute in duration. Input is in real time throughout the business day. A longer batch run ("circles") takes place at set times during the day to allow linked trades (which do not settle in the standard process) to be settled. The longest takes account of all open trades, and lasts around 15 minutes; three further daily runs take account of government debt transactions only and take on average 2-3 minutes to run. Certain functions cannot be input during the running of the circles process (e.g. changes to settlement bank limits) and certain will not be added to the process queue until the end of circles (e.g. newly input trades).
3.	Does the depository allow interactive communication (on line real time) with its users, enabling settlement input and amendment?	Interactive communication is possible through a GUI to the CREST system giving direct access to the online database. High volume users will have direct links to the system and communicate mainly through file transfer again in real time. Virtually all the functionality is available both through interactive and through file transfer.
4.	Has the depository ever failed to recover an outage within the day or failed to start processing runs for a whole day; and, if so, when did that failure arise and what steps have been taken to prevent a similar event in the future?	This has never occurred.