Interoperability is the ability of different IT systems to effectively and correctly interact and communicate. Lack of interoperability poses substantial problems throughout IT, due to the heterogeneity of IT systems in use today.

In the area of capital market technologies, Interoperability is a particularly important issue, with a large number of organisations and systems involved in trading millions of transactions worth trillions of dollars on hundreds of key market places everyday.

An important area of Interoperability is the establishment of standards, and in as much as this is a process of negotiations between IT systems suppliers and systems integrators, the CMCRC recognizes that this is not within its scope of research.

The CMCRC’s Interoperability programme focuses on the following points:

• Providing hands-on education for students, based on the CMCRC’s access to and operation of actually trading and market surveillance platforms used in some of the world’s largest stock exchanges.
• Research targeted at improved efficiency of trading systems through process integration.
• Research targeted at developments towards Straight Through Processing through improved system architecture.