Vicente Castillo, President and Chief Executive Officer of FIE otherwise known as the Philippine Dealing System Holdings Corp. (PDeX) Group, said the STP will fasttrack the closing of deals done through the exchange system.

The STP will automatically settle any done transactions dealt through the PDeX system via BTr’s DVP-ROSS, explained Castillo. FIE is the country’s electronic trading for government securities and other corporate debt instruments.

He added that under this platform there is no re-input of the amounts and government securities that underlies the transactions, thereby, speeding-up the settlement.

"It will be introduced within the month," Castillo said. STP is the by-product of the connectivity of PDeX with the ROSS of BTr.

DVP-ROSS was established by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas and BTr in collaboration with the Money Mart Association of the Philippines (MART) in 2004, which checks the underlying securities and automatically debits or credits them in the account of transacting banks under the ROSS.

The system gives an automatic instruction to the ROSS to settle the account once the deal has been consummated.

Castillo admitted that the introduction of the system has been postponed for several days because of the clearances some foreign banks operating in the country have to obtain from their headquarters abroad.

He, though, expressed optimism the system will be in-placed "within the month."

Market players, on the other hand, are not gangho about the STP, saying that "what PDeX will be doing is to use the same system, already, inplaced."

"There is no innovation," a bank treasury official, who have been very critical of the FIE, lamented.

The bank official, also, pointed that the introduction of the STP in the FIE will bear "added cost to the banks."