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This interview is a small excerpt from a comprehensive interview published in The Wall Street Transcript as part of the Technology Sector, available at (001-212-952-7433) or http://www.twst.com/sectors/techno.html

TWST: It’s often helpful to start off the interview with maybe a brief historical sketch of the company and also a quick introduction to royalblue group and Fidessa as well.

Mr Aspinwall: I will quickly start with an introduction to what the company is about. As you probably know we are a software company working in the equity sector and our company is really about providing software to automate the business process flows of sell side firms (for example investment banks) trading equities. What we do is unique in that we have approached the whole problem of developing products for investment banking from a business process automation standpoint. Our sole product is called “fidessa” and as you probably gathered from the website, it is not a single product, rather it is a suite of products all running on a common platform, each product automating a different piece of the business flow. When we sell to a customer we typically sell a number of components initially to solve their immediate problem and then over a period of years we keep selling new components as we automate more and more of their business flow. The way in which royalblue started was actually as a consultancy company which operated in the financial markets at the end of the 80’s and early 90’s. At that time what we saw in the markets was a lot of niche application products, which were quite successful in their particular area, and a different supplier typically provided each product. These suppliers grew quite successfully and got to a certain size and then stopped growing because they had sold product to as many customers in their niche as they could. What we saw was that there was an opportunity there - that if you came at the problem from a business process automation angle you could actually wrap all those niche applications together and provide a single platform which incorporated all those applications. This has really been our strategy ever since. We started off in the London market before extending the product set to support the US market and then developing support for the Asian markets through bases in Hong Kong and Japan.

TWST: Who does royalblue compete with in this space and what distinguishes Fidessa from the competition?

Mr Aspinwall: Looking at the competition is quite interesting because, as I have said, no one has really approached the problem in exactly the same way as we have from the business process automation angle. So what we tend to see is that we have different competitors in each country we work in. In the US on the NASDAQ side, we would be competing quite heavily with Sungard with their Brass product. On the listed side we might be competing with a company called NYFIX. If you look in the London market itself, we tend to not compete with anybody as it’s our strongest market and a market we have been the principal player in for many years. Moving out into Europe on the French market we might complete for market execution with GL, in the German market we might compete with a company called RTS. In Asia, we compete with Midas Kapiti in the Hong Kong market and the Korean market and a company called Fox Fusion in the Japanese market. Typically, we will compete against the strong local player in each of the markets we operate in.

TWST: What is your current opinion of the market as of now and which specific market has the most growth potential?

Mr Aspinwall: For us specifically, the US market is our biggest growth opportunity. It’s the largest equity market in the world and so going forward the US should eventually be our largest office. We started the US office at the end of ’96, beginning of ’97. It has been growing very rapidly since then but it is still not the size of our European operation. Given the market size out there, that’s where we expect the growth will come from.

TWST: Is there any other industry trends, issues that are driving the growth of the business currently?

Mr Aspinwall: There are a lot of issues in the industry at the moment. Generally, the investment banking community is not having a particularly good time. One of the reasons why we have not seen a more marked effect is that automating our customer’s business processes obviously has a knock on effect of reducing their costs. So we are finding that a lot of firms are looking specifically at ways to automate their processes. I guess it’s a little bit like in the factory world where for may years people have been looking for ways to improve efficiency. So now it goes without saying that if you want to have an efficient factory you need to have automated production lines. This view is becoming a stronger and stronger driver in the investment banking community where they regard their business more like a production line and are continually asking themselves “how can we make it more efficient?” and “how can we automate more of it?”

TWST: Over the past one to two years, what was the company’s focus, any significant moves the company has made?

Mr Aspinwall: The focus has always been on software to automate the business processes and if you look at all the products that we’ve bought out over the last two years, they’ve all been on that basis. We have developed a lot of specific exchange gateways and exchange trading interfaces to support the overall automation of the larger business flow. We’ve bought out products to support the confirmation part of the process, to automate the fax and telex links and to automate the confirmation process prior to settlement. That has been a consistent strategy that continues to bring out more products to automate more of the flow.