Traiana, the post-trading technology provider that is owned by giant brokerage ICAP and CLS Group have revealed that Barclays Capital is the latest bank to join an initial group of eight banks as a CLS Aggregation Participant in CLS Aggregation Service (CLAS).
CLSAS was established to address the operational challenges of high volume, high frequency trading resulting from the continued growth in FX volumes and the rapid expansion of the FX community.
The service matches and compresses trades between CLS Aggregation Parties before downstream processing and settlement in CLS Bank, in a bid to improve post trade operational efficiencies and costs and boosting business growth.
The banks that have signed up to the group include BoA Merrill Lynch, Credit Suisse, Citibank, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Royal Bank of Scotland.
The service went live in January 2010 and the Founding Aggregation Participants have adopted the service over the course of the year.
It has seen a steady growth in FX volumes as the current Aggregation Parties continue to bring more flow onto the service. This was evidenced on 15 March 2011 when the service processed the highest daily volume recorded so far with 295,984 gross trades aggregated down to 11,788, which shows a compression rate of 96% and a value of $286 billion.
Rising volumes in the FX markets have highlighted the importance of CLS Aggregation, says Gil Mandelzis, CEO at Traiana. With the support of nine of the worlds largest banks, the value for existing and future CLSAS participants continues to increase. We look forward to working with this growing group of participants to further improve post-trade processing in foreign exchange.