INTERNATIONAL PURSUIT CORPORATION AND EXBET.COM LTD.
JOINT PRESS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
ú Exbet files for European Patent
March 29th 2000 ? International Pursuit Corporation , a Toronto Stock Exchange company
(?Pursuit? stock symbol IPJ.TO), and Exbet.com Ltd (?Exbet?) are pleased to announce that Exbet has filed a Patent application at the European Patent Office. The invention, for which the Patent Application has been filed, relates to fixed-odds financial betting, a new type of speculative service available to financial markets investors.
Although betting in many diverse forms has been in existence for thousands of years, the concept of a bet on the future performance of one or more financial market indicators is a relatively recent one.
One way to place such a bet is known in technical terms as the ?digital option? or ?contingent claim?. Digital bets are of the same form as a traditional sporting bet in that the speculator predicts a certain event and receives either a fixed sum of winnings (if that event does occur) or no winnings (if the event does not occur). For instance, a speculator may bet that a certain stock index will rise to a certain level by a certain time. If the named index does reach this level, the speculator wins an agreed amount of money irrespective of any amount by which the index has exceeded the predicted level. It is this type of bet that is known as a ?fixed odds? bet, as opposed to a ?variable odds? bet such as a ?spread bet? offered by traditional financial bookmakers.
However, problems face the individual investor who wishes to place bets on the financial markets. For instance, many of the financial instruments, available for speculative purposes, are rather sophisticated and are often beyond the comprehension of non-professional investors. In addition, ?over the counter? contracts (such as digital options) are typically offered in large minimum contract sizes, and are therefore beyond the financial reach of the ordinary individual speculator.
Problems also face the bookmaker who wishes to offer financial bets to the private investor. These include the fact that financial bookmaking is labour-intensive, with skilled staff being required to constantly adapt the odds offered on an immense variety of possible bets to market conditions that are changing on a minute-by-minute basis. This makes it economically unviable to employ skilled staff to calculate the odds to offer sufficiently quickly. Further it is very difficult to accurately price complicated or unusual bets, and bookmakers typically offer only a few standard bets on a few markets.
The Exbet patent application details an invention that seeks to solve all of these problems enabling a bookmaker to offer, efficiently, a wide range of financial bets, to speculators wishing to place relatively small bets. The system allows a client to access a user terminal (typically a web-page on the internet), which accepts parameters, input by the client, relating to a fixed-odds bet on an aspect of a financial market. These parameters might include how much they want to pay for the bet, how much they would like to win, the time to expiry of the bet, the type of bet and the security to be bet upon. A central processing machine with appropriate software and access to a real time data on the financial markets then calculates how much the clients stands to win or how much the bet costs. This information is then displayed to the client on the web page, who then has the opportunity to accept or decline the bet. Should they accept they have the opportunity to pay electronically, by a number of means.
It is anticipated that the patent application will assist Exbet in opening up negotiations with potential licensees and joint venture partners which will broaden the market opportunities for the use of its technology and enhance its revenue potential.
The Exbet.com venture was initiated by Mr Jean-Yves Sireau, a Hong Kong-based entrepreneur and founder of Fortitude Securities (Hong Kong) Ltd., a leading provider of online dealing solutions to the Hong Kong brokerage industry. Exbet.com will be the first company to offer a comprehensive fixed odds betting service on financial stock indices and eventually a whole range of equity and foreign exchange related bets. Exbet.com is affiliated to Regent Pacific Group Ltd., a company listed on the Hong Kong and Frankfurt Stock Exchanges and controlled by Internet financier Jim Mellon. Exbet.com Ltd. has recently entered into a letter of intent with Pursuit whereby Pursuit will acquire a 50% stake in Exbet.com Ltd.
Exbet.com intends to be the market leader in fixed-odds financial betting by establishing a round-the-clock financial betting service on a variety of financial securities and will offer fixed-odds on bets via it?s Cook Islands tax-free subsidiary, recently the beneficiary of a Ministerial Exemption for internet fixed-odds financial betting from the Cook Islands Finance Ministry (www.cbet.co.ck) and it?s Austrian subsidiary Exbet.com Finanzwetten GmbH (www.finanzwetten.at). |
