Swapswire says the five dealers have begun sending CDS confirmations between themselves using the service. The system allows dealers to confirm trade details between each other using standardised terms and defaults in either short or long form.

The new service supports confirmation of corporate and sovereign CDS trades for European, North American, Latin American and Central and Eastern European reference entity names, with support for Asia Pacific to follow shortly. Mark-It Partners' reference entity (Red) database is fully integrated and users can also load their own reference data.

Typically CDS trades take several days to be confirmed using the current fax-based process but the SwapsWire service offers confirmation within minutes of execution. The trade booking is initially taking place in parallel with the banks' existing confirmation process.

Chip Carver, CEO of SwapsWire, says: "Our setup allows dealers to agree quickly the legal confirmation and to know that they have the exact same trade details in their respective systems."

The service uses the recently published ISDA FpML 4-0 XML-based protocol to support the electronic confirmation of transactions.

Swapswire says a number of dealers will start to use the system to completely replace their existing confirmation process from November 20th.

In a seperate announcement, French trading technology vendor Ubitrade has added a credit default swaps module to its Tradix system. The system provides a pricing screen using standard models such as JP Morgan and pricing models dedicated to the CDS basket (Hull & White and Copulas), and offers market data capture and deal capture in conformance with Isda standards.