The Traiana Harmony Service, providers of post-execution STP for the FX market, is working with institutional electronic trading platform Hotspot FXi, a subsidiary of Knight Capital Group, Inc. to introduce NetLink efficiencies for Hotspot FXi's clients.
NetLink is a rules-based ticket netting engine that can significantly reduce the number of tickets processed in the back office of the FX prime broker.
Hotspot FXi is a spot foreign exchange ECN for the institutional marketplace, which enables client bidding and offering and anonymous, instantaneous, direct access trading on live, executable, prices streamed by leading foreign exchange banks, financial institutions and entered by clients.
Trades executed on Hotspot FXi are cleared through a network of top rated clearing banks and prime brokers. Hotspot FXi was the top-rated ECN in the key execution speed and straight-through-processing (STP) rankings of the authoritative Euromoney Foreign Exchange Survey in 2005 and 2006.
NetLink will enable prime brokers to net trades their clients execute on Hotspot FXi by currency pair at pre-defined points throughout the day. NetLink was launched in January 2007. The introduction of Netlink to Hotspot FXi participating banks will introduce new efficiencies which will encourage market growth and adoption of the platform.
Daily traded volumes in FX are rising, while more FX organizations are trading smaller ticket sizes, but in greater numbers, through algorithmic trading. This puts increasing pressure on the back offices of the FX banks offering prime brokerage.
NetLink provides an efficient solution as it receives deals from the electronic platform and determines whether or not each deal is netting-eligible based on customer-defined parameters.
The majority of FX trades are then processed and netted by NetLink, and then electronically confirmed to the prime broker's back office either as deal tickets or simply as payment records.
During a recent pilot, NetLink achieved a 95% reduction in ticket volume, effectively netting dozens of prime customer traders into single tickets.
Gil Mandelzis, CEO, Traiana said: "NetLink helps FX-trading prime brokers net their customer trades efficiently and effectivelly, perpetuating the growth of liquidity. Efficiencies supported by enhanced straight-through-processing remove the need for manual intervention, freeing up prime broker back-office capability."