FFastFill has initially signed four major institutions for this service. These include ABN AMRO, Bank of America, HSBC and the Royal Bank of Scotland. These clearing members of CME will not only support their internal trading teams but also offer a service to non-clearing member firms that use the Reuters Dealing 3000 platform, to take advantage of this new foreign exchange market opportunity. FFastFill’s ASP approach offers participants easy implementation, efficiency and flexibility, allowing firms to increase their trading capabilities.
“FFastFill is delighted that it has been able to contribute to this highly innovative industry project working alongside two of the most important firms in financial markets,” said FFastFill’s Executive Chairman and CEO, Keith Todd. “We believe this project has the capability to change the landscape of the FX market over the coming years as it creates a bridge between OTC markets and exchange traded and cleared/CCP markets. Reuters has nearly 18,000 Dealing 3000 users across 4,000 institutional customers and CME averages $35 billion a day in FX. We believe that FFastFill is well placed to provide application services to those firms that decide to support the Reuters-CME initiative.”
FFastFill has been an integral part of the project team that brought this important new service to market. FFastFill developed the software interface to a new Reuters API and built a fully resilient and fast operational service. The service has been subjected to rigorous testing for up to 24 hours a day over several months. FFastFill will support the service 24 hours a day during the CME FX trading days (five and half days per week). The support will be provided from the firm’s London and Chicago support centres. FFastFill’s service includes order routing, which links Dealing 3000 trading screens to CME FX futures trading environment, and a risk management service for the clearing firms.
Mark Robson, Reuters Global Head of Treasury and Fixed Income, said: "It is an important aspect of this exciting new service from Reuters that the Clearing Firms have openness and choice in their part of the connectivity to the CME GLOBEX markets. The FFastFill ASP approach satisfies this need very well and enables a fast implementation so that clearing firms can be taking part as soon as possible."
FFastFill believes that this new approach to linking trading communities to new pools of liquidity provides further opportunities for the company over the coming years and that FFastFill’s new generation of application services is ideally suited to this new approach as a result of both the modular design of the application software and the in-built performance, security and resilience of the service.
Said Todd “This is another important milestone for FFastFill as we have demonstrated the benefits of our application services approach and our ability to deliver an innovative robust service for the foreign exchange community. We are looking forward to continue working with Reuters, CME and the clearing community on developing this project further and spreading its use throughout the global FX community.”
