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Following a colossal merger between two disparate trading cultures, Chase continues to upgrade its 860-position New York trading floor - including new desktops, flat panel monitors and slimmer turrets.
Two years ago, John Ropas, vice president of Chase Manhattan Bank's New York-based global markets technology team, had the daunting task of consolidating Chemical's 440 trading positions at 270 Park Avenue with Chase's 400 positions at One Chase Manhattan Plaza. Up for the challenge, Ropas had held a similar position at Chemical Bank before the two banks merged on April 1, 1996.
Today, Chase's new Park Avenue trading floors boast more standardized, state-of-the-art trading room technologies and a more streamlined global networking infrastructure, evidence that the integration has been a resounding success. Says Ropas, "Considering the fact that we merged two disparate cultures and the new floor runs as smoothly as it does, I think what we accomplished is spectacular."
Chase's New York trading facilities now house 860 traders and 500 operational and support staff, roughly the same number of trading positions of all of its other global trading rooms combined. Given the size of the site, added efficiencies have helped reduce the overall costs of running the bank's $955 million global trading operations, and have made it the model for upgrading the bank's other trading rooms worldwide, including London and Tokyo.
Chase initiated the first phase of its New York consolidation by moving 210 investment-banking professionals to the fifth floor of the former Chemical building at 270 Park. Then, between March and October 1997, Ropas' team moved 140 international fixed income traders and 300 foreign exchange traders to the sixth floor; and 250 U.S. securities traders, 50 treasuries traders and another 150 derivatives traders to the eighth floor.
All of these people were moved strategically on various dates over the last year and a half. But before these moves could happen, old technologies had to be replaced. As a result, Chase had to overhaul its entire trading room infrastructure from the ground up.
To start, the global markets technology team re-cabled the floors to alleviate network bottlenecking and to provide greater bandwidth to servers and desktops. They opted for 10/100MB per second ethernet switched connections to each desk and 100MB per second to the...