The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) is the first bank to launch electronic inflation swap trading within its single dealer portal on Bloomberg.
RBS has developed a market-leading inflation trading engine based on the technology that has propelled us into one of the top positions in the interest rate swap market.
The RBS inflation trading engine provides swift pricing of European inflation markets allowing a real-time tradable market to be streamed to customers' desktops. By bringing together both inflation bond and swap markets in this way, RBS is the first bank in the world to be able to offer its clients electronically executable inflation swaps via Bloomberg, with the same guarantees of quality of service given in the interest rate swap market.
The RBS inflation swap offering covers the main European indices - Eurozone CPI, UK RPI and French CPIxt. The product is the zero-coupon inflation swap, which accounts for the vast majority of the inflation derivative market. Customers signed-up to trade can choose to execute swaps from one year to 50 years in maturity using either the click-to-trade or request-for-quote protocols. Either way, once executed the confirmation is immediate.
To maximise efficiency downstream, straight though processing means the deal books instantly into the trader's risk management system, and the client can be assured that their confirmation will arrive both swiftly and accurately with no manual input required.
Full trade details and trading history are available to the customers and their support staff through the Bloomberg platform.
Michelle Neal, Head of Debt Markets eCommerce, RBS, said: "A policy of offering highly competitive, automatically executable prices 22 hours a day, with a broad degree of flexibility in the USD IRS market for example, has seen RBS become one of the banks of choice for execution and a name synonymous with quality of service in the marketplace."
Charles Harris, Head of Inflation Trading, RBS, said: "RBS wholeheartedly believes that the inflation swap market is now ready for electronic trading and will continue to break boundaries in 2006 and beyond with new markets, more flexibility in the products and wider means of distribution."