Capitolis Launches Novation Service for Forex Market Participants

Gil Mandelzis, CEO of Capitolis
Gil Mandelzis, CEO of Capitolis

Capitolis, the specialist technology provider for the capital markets, has announced last week that it has launched a groundbreaking novation service in foreign exchange, a first of its kind in forex market. Citi, HSBC, BlueCrest and Brevan Howard are some of the leading market participants who have collaborated with Capitolis on this service.

Capitoli’s novation service automates manual workflow in both Fx prime broking and bilateral trading thus helps increasing capital efficiencies in forex. The novation service will help in reducing costs and inefficiencies linked to the manual process novation that banks currently use to meet their regulatory capital requirements as well as managing client credit capabilities.

The service expected to go live in next few weeks and is currently in test phase. This service will be available to all prime brokers, executing banks, hedge funds and real money manager for all Fx instruments like options, swaps, forwards and Non-deliverable Forwards.

The company is making significant investments in building new technology for capital markets. In March 2018, it has also secured $29 million in funding from Sequoia Capital and Index Ventures.

Gil Mandelzis, CEO of Capitolis said:

“Over the past few months, we’ve been working with major market participants on developing an industry solution for novations. We are grateful to the strong support our solution has received from prime brokers, executing banks and leading buy-side firms. We are looking forward to going live with the solution in the next few weeks and will roll out significant further functionality throughout this year.”

Sanjay Madgavkar, Global Head of FX Prime Brokerage at Citi, said:

“Capitolis is focused on innovative ideas which will help prime brokers and their clients. We are delighted to be engaged in new and creative products to help the prime brokerage industry move forward in the right direction.”

Bevan Kaminer, COO at Brevan Howard, said:

“We support the efforts of Capitolis in improving standards of practice in the FX novation market, notably in terms of the efficiency savings this can bring to buy-side firms, and look forward to our continued collaboration.”

Paul Lawrence, Operations Manager at BlueCrest, said:

“The Capitolis option novation solution is a positive step forward in terms of bringing a level of standardisation and efficiency to a traditionally operationally intensive process. They have been swift in designing a collaborative tool which will ultimately benefit the whole FXPB ecosystem.”

Vincent Bonamy, Head of Global Intermediary Services at HSBC
Vincent Bonamy, Head of Global Intermediary Services at HSBC

Vincent Bonamy, Head of Global Intermediary Services at HSBC said:

“Our key focus as a leading FX house is to provide the best level of client service possible. This partnership opens a new way to increase the quality and efficiency of our offerings in terms of transparency and automation”.