OPUS-5 signs on three major firms

Three financial services firms have joined a private trading system to swap stocks away from government scrutiny.
Bank of America Corp., Credit Suisse Group of Zurich, Switzerland and UBS AG, headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, and Zurich will join the Open Platform for Unregistered Securities, or OPUS-5, according to a joint statement by the banks.
They join the systems’ creators, New York-based Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and the Bank of New York InvestmentNews, Aug. 15.
BoNY Mellon will act as independent administrator and is developing the platform for OPUS-5, which is slated to launch this month.
OPUS-5 isn’t the first unregistered securities platform: Goldman Sachs & Co. of New York unveiled the Goldman Sachs Tradable Unregistered Equity system, or GS TRuE, in May.
Bear Stearns Cos. Inc. of New York announced its own trading platform last month.
Institutional investors with at least $100 million in assets to invest are the target audience for these systems.