Raiffeisen Bank International (RBI) has established a post-trade settlement partnership with SEE Link, the joint trading platform of seven south eastern European stock exchanges.
The partnership will see RBI and SEE Link develop a post-trade solution for settling cross-border trades.
RBI’s Group Securities Services (GSS) Operations Centre will act as settlement agent for the trades executed on SEE Link, as it looks to overcome certain asset servicing challenges caused by differing currencies and legal structures across the participating countries.
“Members of participating stock exchanges will in the future be able to trade and settle trades executed on SEE Link. Furthermore, our international clients will gain easy access to those markets through our GSS Operations Centre,” said Attila Szalay-Berzeviczy, head of RBI Group Securities Services.
The partnership will also help further develop SEE Link’s regional order-routing infrastructure, which was first established following a grant from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) to help the integration of local securities markets.
“We believe that this will facilitate the challenging process of cross-border settlement in SEE and further attract new investors from outside the region”, said Ivan Steriev, president of the supervisory board of SEE Link and CEO of the Macedonian Stock Exchange.
This is the latest partnership for RBI in the region as it looks to enhance connectivity to market infrastructures in central, eastern and southern Europe.
In 2015, it created a regional custody hub in Vienna to service 10 central and eastern Europe central securities depositories (CSDs), establishing direct settlement links with Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovenia and Slovakia.
In April RBI sold its core banking operations in Poland, but remains a provider of custody and settlement services in the country through the hub.