The specialist financial institution, CLS Group has reported a 2.5 per cent growth in average daily volume to $130 billion across its FX settlement service in 2018.
Broader adoption of CLS Settlement solution in 2018 has helped the group to report upbeat metrics on FX Settlement. This has helped in achieving a stronger year with a 12 per cent increase in terns if average daily gross volume compared to the year prior.
The company in its statement said that 90 per cent of this growth came from the buy-side client and average daily volume from buy-side clients settled at 18 per cent higher from 2017. The most notable spot of CLS’s HI 2018 report was its CLS Settlement business and asset’s amortization period being reduced, which will have a negative impact on the unit’s profitability for a number of periods. This also reflects CLS Group’s approach to replace and modernize the underlying technology platform that supports CLS Settlement. On completion, CLS Settlement will enable more efficiency, multi-session capability and adhere to the industry standards to meet its future goals.
All these are part of the Group’s broader strategy that aims to transform the CLS image as a traditional settlement services provider. CLS till now has made updates to its existing line of CLS products to make existing services more efficient. The company which was formed in 2002 to reduce FX settlement risks is now promoting itself as a provider of innovative products including post-trade risk management, aggregation and netting solutions.
CLS in its statement has also added that this new participation will help participating institutions to drive process efficiencies including optimizing intraday liquidity, enabling real-time awareness of currency and counterparty exposures and reducing operational and credit risk.
Commenting on the growth figures, Joe Ziccarelli, Head of Sales at CLS, said:
“A key part of CLS’s growth strategy has been to be more actively engaged with the buy-side to help drive wider participation in CLS Settlement. Our latest growth figures prove this strategy is working. We hope to further build our buy-side community with the recent launches of solutions to improve post-trade processing, such as CLSNet and CLSTradeMonitor. These solutions allow buy-side participants to access CLS directly in order to benefit from operational process efficiencies and risk mitigation.”
