CLS/Traiana trade aggregation service live

CLS and Traiana have gone live with a trade aggregation service, developed jointly with eight founding banks.

The service aims to reduce operational risk, lower post trade costs and rationalise and consolidate legacy post-trade processes throughout the global FX markets, the vendors said. Only aggregated trades will need to be processed and settled in CLS, providing settlement risk elimination while alleviating the processing burdens on participating banks by more than 90%.
 
Operating within the CLS regulatory framework, the supporting technology for the system is provided by Traiana Harmony.

The founding eight banks that have committed capital to the initiative are Bank of America, Credit Suisse, Citi, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley and Royal Bank of Scotland.

Rob Close, chief executive of CLS in New York: “Since the announcement in April, there has been widespread support for the service which is endorsed by the eight founding financial institutions. This marks one of a number of steps from CLS Bank to further provide high quality risk reduction and processing efficiency solutions for the FX community. The joint venture with Traiana leverages essential core competences of both institutions and we look forward to a very successful partnership.”

Gil Mandelzis, Traiana's chief executive in New York said: “Today marks a significant landmark in the post-trade landscape. The CLS Aggregation service has the potential to unlock dramatically greater capacity across the industry, which will open up new trading opportunities for retail and institutional investors. We are grateful for the strong support from our founding banks and now turn our focus to growing volumes and increasing participation.”

It is believed that RBS was the first bank to begin testing the service at the end of last year.