Cleartrade Exchange Pte Ltd. (CLTX), the OTC electronic global marketplace for commodity derivatives, in conjunction with Baymarkets, a leading European-based specialist software developer for the financial markets, announced today the release of a new version of its electronic trading platform, utilising FIX 5.0.
As an industry standard, FIX enables clients to integrate CLTX's solution into their own trading environment in a standardised way without the requirement for bespoke connectivity interfaces. Zhi Rui Ang, operations director of Cleartrade Exchange, explained: "Although there has been explosive growth in the use of the FIX protocol within the financial community, certain limitations, present in previous versions of FIX, needed to be addressed, for example the tight coupling of the application layer to the business layer in FIX 4.X versions, which limited the ability to adapt to newer functionality offered by later versions. These limitations have been addressed in FIX 5.0, which is flexible enough to support future requirements of the market." He continued, "CLTX's policy of providing a state-of-the-art trading environment, particularly in areas which enhance and improve business opportunities for its members and partners, is underlined by the launch of the FIX 5.0 API."
FIX 5.0 is richer than previous versions and offers key advantages to CLTX's clients in improved handling of data, including:
• Back-office integration, providing more effective access to the full order-to-trade lifecycle on the CLTX hub.
• Market data messaging, supporting book management and data optimisation.
• Regulatory reporting, accommodating requirements for OATS Phase 2, Regulation NMS and MiFID directives.
• User experience, supporting better order routing, trade capture and external routing.
In addition, CLTX's price transparency feed, also based on FIX 5.0, will act as a source for supplying the exchange's data to the traditional quote vendors.
Oskar Wibling, head of systems integration at Baymarkets, commented, "It is an important and progressive step for CLTX to map users, companies, accounts and securities to their internal identifiers. FIX 5.0 makes all this possible. Bids, offers, spreads, trades and clearing IDs can be reported more efficiently to CLTX's trade hub, other 3rd party trading screens, via DMA, and to quote vendor organisations, providing an efficient means for the market in general to access CLTX's data."
Ang added, "Being able to offer our trading partners access to the platform via FIX 5.0 will be of enormous value to them. We are very excited to be one of the first exchanges to offer this. Given the regulatory emphasis on ID tags, the CLTX platform continues to help brokers and principals meet the stringent trade-reporting and transparency objectives set out by the CFTC and other regulators."