The new service will allow banks' treasury departments and operations departments to manage their investment strategies and financing more efficiently.

Monte Titoli will act as a neutral third-party agent for optimised management of collateral used for finance operations in the inter-bank market. The service is aimed at maximising the efficiency of the process whilst minimising a bank's investment in back-office resources and IT.

Through X-COM's fully customisable process, users will have full control of the risk profile chosen for their investments, enabling them to continuously monitor their portfolio while reducing the administrative risks linked to collateral management activities.

During the initial implementation phase, X-COM will interact with Bank of Italy's pooling system to support Eurosystem credit operations.

The second phase will see the service expand to further centralised activity of collateral management to support different business needs such as financing, securities lending and margin management for operations with central counterparties.

Paolo Cittadini, CEO of Monte Titoli, said: "The new X-COM service responds to our customers' growing need for diversification of financing tools and efficiency on the markets, offering a collateral management service essential to every market participant.

"This project has a systemic relevance, not only for the entity and quantity of subjects involved but also to support the inter-bank market."

*The two parties involved in a transaction delegate to a third party (Monte Titoli) the management of collateral. Monte Titoli acts as a "neutral" agent and common custodian for the collateral held on behalf of both parties. This maximises the efficiency of the process minimising their investment in back office resources and IT.