information and support and connectivity," says Jim Perrello, who heads up the Reuters venture. He would not project a launch date.

Long a force in electronic foreign exchange trading, Reuters is entering an

arena already crowded with players, including some well-established names. Bloomberg has provided commercial paper trading on its terminals

since 1994 and reports by far the most volume, having logged about $4 trillion of CP trades during the first half of 2001.

TradeWeb, a bond trading platform backed by several Wall Street firms, is

expanding into money markets andrecorded more than $425 billion of CP trades in just two months of beta testing. Prescient Markets offers CP

trading on its Web site, cpmarket.com, while FinancialOxygen enables midsize banks to trade several kinds of money-market securities on its

BankOxygen Web site.

As the table below indicates, at least three platforms provide online trading

of money market mutual funds.

Simplicity and Efficiency

Market professionals regard money-market instruments as well suited for

electronic trading, thanks to their relative simplicity and the potential efficiencies for investors, including straight-through processing. Cost

savings are hailed as another plus.

Michael Katz, a senior portfolio manager at Allstate Insurance, does 30%

to 50% of his money market trades electronically, using Bloomberg, TradeWeb and a single-dealer system. The platforms save him money, but

what really excites Katz is the way they accelerate his ability to trade. In a market where demand is outpacing supply, that speed can mean the

difference between "getting the product" and "watching it trade away," he

says.

Some observers believe that Reuters may be too late trying to capture

traders such as Katz. "Bloomberg clearly has the dominant model at this point," says Peter Crane, an editor

of iMoneyNet, a Westborough, Mass.-based provider of saving and borrowing information.

However, Andy Nybo, a senior analyst at Tower Group of Needham,

Mass., says Reuters can't be counted out. "They're a little late to the area, but they have a very well-known brand, aswell as a lot of contacts in the financial

world that will carry them, at least

initially," the analyst says.

LCs Go Online

PPG Industries has become the first company to execute a letter-of-credit

(LC) transaction online, using LCconnect's platform for the $30 million standby LC.

Fifteen banks bid on the LC online and Linda Mula, treasury manager at

Pittsburgh-based PPG, says the transaction took "practically no time at all." That compares with PPG's usual method of calling around to three or

four banks to get bids. PPG plans to use the platform for future transactions, she says.

LCconnect has yet to see a second transaction, but Michael Moretti, its

founder and co-president, says three other companies have signed up for the service.

E-commerce Beefs?

The American Arbitration Association will be happy to settle them for you

online. Its new Dispute Risk Management Portal (www.adr.org) aims to provide companies engaged in e-commerce with tools to reduce

conflicts.

If a dispute arises, the portal will provide either on-call mediation, in which

parties can check a mediator's availability through an online calendar, or enable the feuding parties to submit evidence via online

"documents-only"

arbitration.

A subscription fee will be charged starting in January 2002.