Expanded Clearing Product Codes to be launched in September

 In September, 2005, CME will introduce its first products with clearing product codes which are longer than two bytes.  In particular, we will introduce with products with three-byte clearing product codes.

 In the immediate term, clearing product codes will be limited to three bytes, but in the short to medium-term, they may be expanded to as many as five bytes.  Over the longer term, as the TREX message format is phased out, product codes may become as large as ten bytes.

We expect that this change will have minimal impact to firms, as they already either handle clearing product codes larger than two bytes in bookkeeping systems or they alias actual clearing product codes down to two bytes.  In particular, the FIXML-based PCS and Trade Register formats have no pre-determined maximum length for the product code field, TREX messages support up to five-byte product codes, and the SPAN file supports up to ten-byte codes.  Small changes are being made to the existing settlement price file format and edit file format to support the larger codes.

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