CLS announces post-trade platform for Financial Market Infrastructures
The upgrade allows greater control of change delivery for its settlement solutions and provides a single platform to support CLSSettlement, CLSClearedFX and CLSNow.
CLS has completed Convergence, a significant phase of its multi-year technology investment program, to deliver its advanced post-trade technology platform for global financial market infrastructures (FMIs).
CLS has migrated CLSSettlement onto its Unified Services Platform (USP), thereby optimizing the underlying technology platform supporting its settlement services.
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The upgrade allows greater control of change delivery for its settlement solutions and provides a single platform to support CLSSettlement, CLSClearedFX and CLSNow.
The new platform gives CLS complete ownership of application development and change delivery, with in-house specialists managing ongoing platform support as well as design and development of its settlement services, not to mention enhanced monitoring and automation.
Tom Barkhuff, Chief Information Officer, CLS, commented: “At CLS we are constantly assessing and evaluating new methods to improve our services for the benefit of our members. Our Convergence program is testament to our commitment to this strategy.
“The priority for us is that new technological solutions meaningfully drive efficiency while also meeting extraordinarily high standards of resilience. Through a multi-year technology investment program, we have kept this focus and delivered upon our objective of implementing a best-in-class technology stack for the industry, addressing the needs of our members while maintaining the high standards expected of a systemically important FMI.”
CLS has recently commented on the update to the Global FX Code. The firm welcomed the changes to settlement risk principles on payment-versus-payment and netting.
Changes have placed greater emphasis on the use of PvP settlement mechanisms where available, and provide more detailed guidance on the management of settlement risk where PvP settlement is not used.
CLSSettlement supports market participants with adherence to the updated Code as it uses a PvP system, mitigating settlement risk by settling the payment instructions relating to underlying FX transactions simultaneously.
Today, the service settles over USD5.5 trillion of payments in 18 of the most actively traded currencies globally, for more than 70 direct participants and over 25,000 indirect participants.
The updated version of the Global FX Code was released this week. Eleven of the Code’s fifty-five principles were reviewed.
The committee strengthened the Code’s guidance on anonymous trading, algorithmic trading and transaction cost analysis, disclosures, and settlement risk.