The company says settlement members of CLS Bank will soon be able to outsource their CLS system to Fundtech's ASP to simplify their operations and reduce costs.

Fundtech already has 20 settlement member clients for its PayPlus for CLS product, and these clients collectively account for an estimated 50 per cent of the value of all daily CLS trades.

Paul Harris, vice president, FX Settlement at Fundtech, says: "With this service, we are mainly targeting those organisations who run their own CLS operations, either with a vendor solution or through a system they have developed themselves. By using the ASP service they can reduce their operating costs by around a third, depending on the complexity of their operations, and also reduce the risk of CLS expertise within the organisation being concentrated in just a few staff."

Fundtech will operate its CLS ASP in a high-security facility in Europe with full redundancy, auto notification and alerting, and scheduled proactive maintenance. Harris says the company has worked with CLS to address potential concerns about concentration of risk and points of failure, and is currently testing the technology infrastructure behind the service, which will be available by the end of the first quarter of 2005.

"Using an ASP service is a good way to simplify the process of keeping up with developments at CLS Bank," says Harris. "CLS is considering changes such as the introduction of multiple settlement windows, or incorporating standard settlement instruction databases, and those companies who have built their own solutions in-house might be faced with substantial development projects to take advantage of these changes. For certain banks this might be a prompt to consider an ASP service."