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American Financial Exchange (AFX), a centralized, electronic, self-regulated, fully transparent platform launched in 2015 to directly reflect true unsecured funding costs for a nationally broad base of U.S. banks and financial institutions in the private sector, announces its 2018 results.
Highlights include:
- Volume growth – at the end of 2018, AFX had transacted more than $275 billion since it opened in December of 2015; volumes more than tripled from the end of 2017 to the end of 2018 and increased from a daily average of $306 million in the fourth quarter of 2017 to $1,117 billion in the fourth quarter of 2018.
- Membership growth – membership grew from 6 founding members in December of 2015 to 114 members as of December 31, 2018, including its newest members Northern Trust and Deere and Co. (the first corporation to join); the number of members increased from 72 at the end of 2017 to 114 at the end of 2018, a sixty percent increase. Current AFX Membership is comprised of 93 banks and 21 non-banks.
- New products – AFX now also offers a correspondent market where member banks can aggregate a pool of funds from “downstream” associate banks and offer them on the AFX platform. In December, a record 294 institutions (members and associates) transacted on the AFX platform.
- Sectoral diversity – AFX membership has expanded from banks to also include non-banks such as insurance companies, broker-dealers, private equity firms, corporations, hedge funds and money managers.
AMERIBOR® - AFX facilitates the determination of AMERIBOR®, a transaction-based interest rate benchmark. The rate is calculated as the weighted average daily volume in the AFX overnight unsecured loan market. The rate is now available on Bloomberg terminals under the ticker symbol AMBOR. In 2018, ServisFirst Bank in Birmingham, Alabama became the first bank to index a commercial loan to AMERIBOR. Others AFX Members are also in the process of using AMERIBOR to benchmark new issuance assets. AMERIBOR enables banks and financial institutions to optimize asset-liability management by matching assets and liabilities through the benchmark AMERIBOR.
