Centradia, the European treasury trading portal established by Sanpaolo IMI, Santander Central Hispano, Société Générale and The Royal Bank of Scotland, is reporting a 40% monthly increase in trading volumes as it celebrates its first anniversary.
Since the technical launch in November 2001 and the commercial take-off in early 2002, Centradia member banks claim to have registered more than 350 trading clients. The number of trades passing through the portal is now running at over 2000 a month, Centradia reports, and pre-trade and post-trade services are also experiencing similar growth.
"The distribution of our trading and non-trading activities is well balanced across various categories of clients, countries and products; we now have mid-cap and large-cap corporates, asset managers, financial institutions and other clients from beyond the initial core countries and core targets of our member banks," comments Fabrice Mativat, Centradia’s CEO & head of business development. "This proves that Centradia caters for the diverse needs of the buy-side. It also shows that Centradia fits well in the various e-commerce strategies of our member banks."
The Centradia banks are hailing the figures as proof of the success of the bank-based marketing approach and multi-bank pricing model.
Yvette Debrie, head of SG's French FX and treasury sales teams, says the bank has promoted the platform as a mechanism for conducting classical money market and treasury transactions. "Not only have our client relationships remained unchanged, they have indeed been reinforced as our sales people are now freed to focus more time with their clients on individually tailored solutions for more intricate matters".
Mativat says clients welcome the pricing transparency which comes from dealing over Centradia, and the ability to trade forex and money market from a single platform, at competitive prices.
Says the deputy manager of a UK based commodity and bullion company: "Even if we do not have relationships with all the Centradia banks, we have consistently received four competitive quotes for all our requests and we have been able to deal on the best execution principle with our relationship bank, even if it had not originally offered the most competitive price. This transparency has been a considerable benefit, particularly for some of our activities requiring an auditable proof of best-execution, a regulatory requirement."