CLS Bank will today begin settling payment instruction in four new currencies - the Hong Kong dollar, the Korean won, the New Zealand dollar and the South African rand.
The new currencies join the existing eleven, the Australian dollar, Canadian dollar, Danish krone, euro, Japanese yen, Norwegian krone, Singapore dollar, Swedish krona, Swiss franc, UK sterling, and US dollar as CLS Bank eligible currencies.
CLS Bank was set up to eliminate the temporal risk of default in interbank FX settlement and is now settling on average over 150,000 payment instructions a day with a gross value in excess of US$1.6 trillion.
Over 250 institutions use the network, of which 58 are CLS bank members, including four new members from Korea and South Africa: Korea Exchange Bank, Kookmin Bank, Absa and Standard Bank of South Africa.
An additional 191 banks, non-bank financial institutions and corporates and over 35 funds use the service as third party customer participants.
The addition of the new currencies is a response to surging volumes in Asia Pacific currency trading. CLS is lining up the Mexican peso as the next currency for the risk reduction treatment, sometime in 2006.