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In the late 1960s, Stanley Ross, resident managing director of Kidder Peabody Securities in London, had a problem.

Ross was one of the most experienced traders in the Eurobond market. The son of a London bus conductor, he had left school at 15 to join the Royal Air Force. After a brief period in the service, he left in 1951 and headed to the City, where he had joined the stockbroking firm Strauss, Turnbull & Co. In 1963, on a routine inspection of the office, Julius Strauss found the young Stanley Ross reading a translation of Marcel Proust's À la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Impressed with this display of intellect, Strauss promoted him to the equity trading department. From there, he was appointed to trade the Autostrade issue and was, therefore, one of the first people to trade the Eurobond market. He joined Kidder Peabody in 1967 and there oversaw the rapidly expanding trading in Eurobonds.

Although London was establishing itself as the home of secondary trading in Eurobonds, in 1967 New York remained the centre where they were settled. The settlement process was still highly manual, and the rapid expansion in the volume of trades had created a logjam. Each night, the clerks would send a telex to the firm's bank in New York listing the bonds it should receive and deliver on its traders' behalf. Kidder Peabody's New York bank Schroder would report payments that it had made on its behalf against bonds received. The problem was that there never seemed to be any corresponding reports for cash received when the traders had sold bonds. At a time of rising interest rates, Kidder Peabody's overdraft costs were skyrocketing, eating up all the trading profits.