Primeon Expands Decimalization Services to Provide Performance Optimization.

Business/Technology Editors

BURLINGTON, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 7, 2000

New Service Complements Conversion Services, Preparing Financial

Service Companies for Increasing Volumes Caused by

Decimalization and Other Service Enhancements

Primeon Inc., a leading provider of eBusiness solutions to financial service companies, today announced Performance Optimization, a new infrastructure service designed to enable financial service companies to support the increased system volumes associated with decimalization and other planned service enhancements. The new service builds on Primeon's existing decimalization conversion service that converts securities trading systems from fraction to decimal pricing.

Primeon's Performance Optimization service will also prepare financial service companies for other future service enhancements predicted to increase demand on trading systems, including 24-hour trading, next-day and day-of settlement, straight-through-processing and other eBusiness initiatives. Primeon's decimalization programs are part of a full portfolio of eBusiness solution services, including eBusiness integration, optimization, Internet strategy and design that will be formally announced later this month.

On January 28, the Securities and Exchange Commission ordered U.S. securities markets to begin quoting stock and option prices in decimals by July 3 and to complete the process by year-end. The order also requires that the SEC receive implementation plans by mid-March.

Primeon is currently working with leading financial services companies to prepare their systems for decimalization and other strategic and tactical IT projects. Primeon's decimalization services are designed to convert the IT infrastructures of securities firms to accommodate new price formats and messaging volume associated with decimal pricing. This will allow companies to meet increased transaction volume without sacrificing functionality or experiencing significant downtime.

Primeon's new services will enhance the performance of securities companies e-commerce systems enabling them to reduce transaction processing time. This prepares organizations to meet the demands of imminent business changes such as 24-hour trading and next-day/day-of settlement (referred to in the industry as T+1 and T+0 to distinguish from the current standard settlement within three days of a trade). When organizations engage Primeon's Performance Optimization service, they will have a system in place for modeling and measuring their systems against the demands of those future service enhancements.

&uot;Our customers are viewing the decimalization mandate by the SEC as an opportunity to assess their trading systems, develop new service models and build systems that will deliver powerful competitive differentiators to their key markets,&uot; said Andrew Kerr, president of Primeon, Inc. &uot;With our extensive experience in helping financial services companies improve systems under stress, our consultants, project managers and technicians are uniquely qualified to address the challenges and opportunities of decimalization.&uot;

Decimalization and Performance

Decimalization will significantly decrease the minimum price variation (MPV) at which securities will be quoted and traded. As investors alter their trading strategies to take advantage of a decreased MPV, certain message types, including trades, quotes, orders, cancels, reports and administrative messages generated by order processing systems will dramatically increase both in volume and frequency. A recent report commissioned by the Securities Industry Associations (SIA) predicts that by 2001, messaging volumes in security trading systems will rise sharply more than double in the area of listed securities trades and over eight times higher in options messages.

Decimalization is the process of converting prices, stocks, bonds and other financial instruments to decimal representation. Many firms are expected to base their decimalization plans on a phased-in approach. A phased approach might start with a limited number of securities and trading in increments as low as $.05. This would be expanded to include all exchange-traded equities and options on equities, and finally quoting and trading all securities in $.01 increments. Plans for phased-in conversion greatly increase complexity, since firms will have to maintain both decimalized and fractional pricing during the conversion period and have the capability to switch individual securities from one conversion to the other.

About Primeon

Founded in 1997, Primeon is a leading provider of enterprise eBusiness solutions designed to maximize the value of eBusiness initiatives for both Fortune 1000 companies and emerging dot.coms. Primeon's integration services are designed to meld the most effective eBusiness platforms available with existing systems to create the most cost-effective and high-performance eBusiness systems. Primeon's services are performed by an elite corps of project managers, consultants and computer scientists with engineering experience in eBusiness strategy and design, network and systems management, and the ability to support more than 70 development languages and platforms - one of the broadest ranges of competence in the industry.