Draft text for Clearing House advisory regarding new capabilities - May 14, 2001

Background for Reporting Changes

When CME member firms deposit collateral assets for meeting performance bond requirements into CME accounts at approved custody banks, they require some form of reporting from the CME to allow them to reconcile against those accounts. Two main types of reporting are required: information about asset balances – the face value of particular assets on deposit at particular instants in time - and information about transactions – specific transactions affecting those balances, such as deposits and withdrawls.

The CME already provides this information to firms in the form of reports and online applications. In order to facilitate this reconciliation process for firms, the CME will shortly begin to provide this information in an additional report, and in machine-readable datafile format. The new report and datafile will initially contain data for Securities in Clearing and Security Deposit type accounts.

This introduction describes both existing and new CME reporting capabilities for asset balances and transactions. Two additional documents detail the file layouts of the new datafiles. Sample files are also provided.

Existing CME-Supplied Reporting

Currently, member firms may obtain information about asset balances via either:

Ø the Asset Inventory Trial Balance Report – report ID CAI500, or

Ø the Assets on Deposit selection on the Asset Inquiry menu of the Clearing 21 Asset Management online application.

Like any CME report, firms may have the CAI500 report printed locally, or they may view it on-line via either the InfoPac 3270 application or via the Document Direct application. (Document Direct is available today through the Clearing 21 workstation, and in the near future will be available via the Internet.) The Clearing 21 Asset Management online application is available via either the Clearing 21 workstation or Citrix, and in the near future will be available via the Internet.

Currently, member firms may obtain information about asset transactions via the Transactions selection on the Asset Management module of the Clearing 21 Asset Management online application.

New CME-Supplied Reporting

The CME will shortly begin providing the following new capabilities:

Reports:

Asset transactions (deposits, withdrawls, etc.) will be viewable via a new Asset Transactions Report available through the Internet.

Data Files:

Both asset balances and asset transactions will be available in a new, machine-readable Asset Balance and Transaction Datafile accessible through the internet. This will allow firms to automate their reconciliation processes, if desired. These files will be available once daily, and will contain end-of-day balances and a listing of all transactions for that business day. For the time being, the files will supply only information on US and Canadian government-backed securities – reporting on other assets on deposit will continue to be supplied through existing reports. To provide member firms with the greatest possible flexibility, this datafile will be available in any of three different formats:

Ø A standard positional-format datafile, with fixed-length records with particular data elements located at particular places on those records.

Ø A comma-delimited datafile, so that the data may be directly imported into various standard applications such as spreadsheets.

Ø An XML-based datafile, which uses the flexibility of Extensible Markup Language.

Detailed documentation and layouts for these file formats, together with sample files, are available on the CME's website at www.cme.com/clearing/financial/financial.htm.

Contact Information

For more information, or to request that the new report and/or any of the new datafiles be made available for your firm, please contact Mr. Tim Golomb, Associate Director, Financial Management, at (312) 930-3194, or email tgolomb@cme.com.