European trading firm MTS is expanding its money market operations to include other short term products and has appointed Ian Forrest as head of money markets to support the move.
Forrest joins MTS from Treasury Dealer Limited, an electronic dealer-to-client platform for money market products which he founded.
Prior to this he was co-head of European treasury at BNP Paribas in London after having managed the bank's international repo desk. Forrest also headed the securities lending trading desk for JPMorgan in London and led international fixed-income for James Capel & Co.
MTS says the expansion of short term products on its platform will offer participants a one stop shop to meet short-term liquidity and interest rate risk management requirements.
Anchored by its strength in Italian repo - the largest repo market in Europe - MTS offers the widest range of products and number of active participants (193 dealers) in this segment. The firm says recent growth has been strong with repo volumes traded in the first half 2003 at nearly six trillion euro, up 18% from the same period last year.
In addition, the MTS Repo Trading Facility (RTF) was recently improved to offer pre-trade blind trading - beneficial for securities that are not cleared and settled by a central counterparty but which profit from pre-trade anonymity. Greek securities, recently introduced on the RTF, are already being traded using this service.