SwapsWire has launched a Japanese OTC Equity Options service. From this month, four dealers and four inter-dealer brokers will use it to electronically confirm their trades. A handful of dealers are already lined up to go live. This is the first time any service of this kind has been offered to the Japanese equities market, says Swapswire.
SwapsWire aims to capture, verify, and confirm deals on-screen within minutes of execution, removing the need for manual processing of paper contracts. As well as the reduction in processing cost, confirmation on trade date (T+0) means a significant reduction in operational risk, says SwapsWire, whose users include dealers, inter-dealer brokers and buy-side clients in Europe, the U.S.A. and Asia for other OTC derivative products including interest rate and credit derivatives.
The system supports new trade and trade-life cycle events including amendments, increases and decreases, terminations, exercises, assignments and corporate actions.
“BNP Paribas has been an active participant in the development of the SwapsWire service for Equity Options,” says Olaf Kasten, BNP Paribas’ Head of Trading, Equities and Derivatives Japan. “We use the system extensively for our European OTC equity business and have realised significant operational efficiencies and virtually eliminated confirmation risk. We are happy to now be able to start using the system in Japan. We like the fact that all parties to the trade – the inter-dealer broker and both traders – will confirm the trade details from a single record within minutes of execution and that the broker confirmation, the trader’s confirmation and our own trade capture can be achieved with a single click.”
Masato Kawamura, President, Central Tanshi Securities Co., Ltd., says he thinks the new service will ” revolutionize the market. The introduction of an online confirmation service will reduce the human errors tremendously, and especially in the growing OTC equity market, it will help us to be more efficient in providing services to our clients.”
Chip Carver, SwapsWire’s CEO, adds that Japan is an important market for the platform. “We are delighted that we have eight market leaders ready to go live with this service,” he says. “It validates our business plan and proves the solid nature of our product. Our Interest Rate Service has been well received and we expect the business to also grow rapidly in the equity market judging from the number of early take ups of the service. We will continue to build on our success here by expanding both our presence and the services we offer.”