A: The new regulations would still have an impact, as all the previous political and economic EU regulations. The effect is that the Swiss Exchange will be under pressure to follow the international standards. The Bern Exchange, however, will not be affected because, as a national oriented exchange, we don’t have international targets.

Q: Do you see future for new products, such as ETFs, derivatives, contracts in oil, gold, agricultural, or financial products, on the Bern Exchange?

A: The derivatives represent an entirely different market, which is much more sophisticated, not in terms of technical understanding, but in terms of investment understanding. I expect greater interest and importance of the derivatives market, but at the moment I don’t see it as very relevant for the Bern Exchange. The Bern Exchange is more focused on enabling the smaller private companies to take the step towards going public, and on providing investors with liquidity and exposure to more names.

Q: What are the expenses for trading on the Bern Exchange, compared to the Swiss Exchange? Does your revenue stream include trading commissions or the sale of stock market data?

A: The listing fees depend on how big the company is and how many shares it has, but the fee would be no more than about $10,000 per year. Our approach is to offer much lower fees than the Swiss Exchange. We do sell some data, but it is a small-scale operation because of our size. The Swiss Exchange can afford to sell market data, and they even sell their technical trading as a commodity. Forward-looking, I expect the exchange to be generating the bulk of its revenues from annual fees. So far the revenues have always been calculated based on the trading volume, but trading volume can go up and down. To have better predictability, we lean more towards annual fees paid by the companies and the participants who are licensed to trade with our system. Overall, there should be three relatively equal revenue streams - volume trading, participants, and listings.

Q: What is your strategy on transparency and disclosure?

A: One of the unique features of the Bern Exchange is that we don’t have to follow the international standards, which means that the disclosure may be less prominent than on the big stock markets. The big exchanges can afford to ask for a lot of information, while we are trying to attract the young companies, and it is more difficult for them to provide detailed figures. For example, a company owned by a few other shareholders would hate to say how much it earned.

But once they are used to disclosure, it is no longer a problem for them to comply with higher standards. Disclosure requires a change of mindset, and that’s why we have set lower initial requirements. In that way we attract new companies that would disclose information for a chance to finance the company. They don’t have to give out too much information, and then they get used to it.

Another special feature of the Bern exchange is that it is entirely Internetbased. Any company or any broker who wants to trade on the Exchange can do so, if he is under the banking law of Switzerland. The Swiss security exchange law says that participants can trade only when they have the license or the back of a broker in Switzerland. But, technically, we are open for any broker in the world.

Q: Does that strategy bring more market makers?

A: The strategy brings market participants, but we don’t actually have market making in Switzerland. We have an order-driven system, not an action-driven system like in the U.S. or the U.K. This is strictly an order-matching market. If we get a new participant and he gets a new issuer, for example, we treat him as a market maker. But if nobody wants to buy the stock and everybody sells the stock, the bank or the broker in Switzerland is not really willing to stand there for the stock. And that’s a good system because, after all, market makers make markets only when they can make money first.