Pierre Laborie, head of marketing at Traderforce, says the April deal to roll out version 9 of the platform is an expansion of an existing global agreement between the two companies and is targeted at users in BNPP's private banking, private equity, corporate finance and asset management businesses.

Laborie says the bank has implemented Traderforce's Screener, Monitor and Premium terminals as part of the market data platform in Zurich, Geneva and Base, targeted at low-, mid- and high-tier users. He declines to comment on the financial terms of the deal.

A source at BNPP confirms it has replaced Reuters' legacy Market Monitor product with Traderforce Screener for its front-office fund managers, but says the bank still uses Reuters and Bloomberg in addition to Traderforce Monitor for its traders.

Laborie says the bank wanted to replace Reuters Market Monitor and looked at mid-tier products from the vendor.

"The [RMM] platform was decommissioned by Reuters, and we had to replace it," says André Kelekis, senior market data strategist at BNPP in Paris, who confirms the bank also considered other products from Reuters and Telekurs Financial's iD product. "Traderforce was already deployed within BNPP Private Banking and … was the best available provider of … market data ASP solutions."

"Their choice was based on our version being easy to deploy when they made comparisons," Laborie says. "It's easy to customize your own screen, save it and then share it," he adds.

Traderforce consists of three product lines: Premium, a full data screen aimed at traders and portfolio managers; Monitor, a more customizable version that can tailor data sets specifically for specialist off-trading floor users and private banking staff; and Screener, which provides a more limited data set of data, charts and news for salespeople, advisors and middle- and back-office staff (IMD, Nov. 8, 2004).

In addition, BNPP is already beta testing version 10 of Traderforce's platform that was unveiled at the SIA show in New York two weeks ago, Laborie says.

Version 10 of the platform includes wireless access through Traderforce Mobile, which will supply market data in real-time to BlackBerrys, smart phones or PDAs. Traderforce Open Publisher will also be an addition to version 10, which enables clients to publish any type of trading and market information. "They are interested in the wireless solution, but at this stage they would not use it. And for Open Publisher, the open architecture will be deployed for the first time at BNP Paribas later this year," Laborie says.

BNPP has used version 9 of Traderforce's market data platform in France, Spain, Italy, the UK and Asia since the beginning of this year. The rollout of version 10 will probably begin in France, and be expanded to include Asia, Switzerland, Italy and the UK later on in the summer, he adds.

Reuters officials decline to comment on the rollout.