Best operations or back-office solution: Murex

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In Asia-Pacific’s (Apac’s) fast-moving financial markets, operations teams face a unique challenge: managing growing complexity while keeping costs under control. Spikes in market activity, fragmented regulation and localisation requirements mean that back-office systems must be robust and adaptable.

Murex’s MX.3 platform underpins trading operations across the Apac region, supporting more than 50 institutions in automating the lifecycle of bilateral and cleared trades. “Our clients appreciate being able to rely on the platform’s stability and performance to keep things running smoothly – even during market shocks,” says Basile Clout, back office product manager, Apac, at Murex. “The intuitive one-stop processing dashboard allows operations teams to quickly identify and resolve exceptions, so they can focus on solving real issues rather than chasing manual tasks.”

Operational resilience under pressure

The past year has put operations infrastructures through their paces. From sudden surges in foreign exchange and US Treasury trading to the global move to T+1 settlement, banks have been required to process more trades, faster, and with no margin for error.

A global systemically important bank with a strong presence across Asia runs its global FX operations on MX.3. The latest upgrade boosted throughput and processing speeds – supporting high straight-through processing (STP) rates. It also introduced Security Assertion Markup Language authentication to strengthen platform security, ensuring performance gains did not come at the expense of operational controls.

Clients value our deep regulatory expertise and the way we package updates. They don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time a new rule comes in – we deliver preconfigured best practices and maintain them as regulations evolve

Basile Clout, Murex

“The high level of STP and automation allows teams to maintain control under pressure,” Clout explains. “It keeps the focus where it belongs – on handling genuine exceptions rather than firefighting.”

Enhancements over the past 12 months have also automated areas that, historically, created manual bottlenecks. One example is the handling of unplanned market holidays – such as typhoon days in Hong Kong or Taiwan – which previously forced operators to update trades manually. “Our new tool automatically identifies affected trades, recommends update strategies and allows users to trigger changes with a single click,” says Clout. “It removes a huge amount of manual effort and operational risk.”

Keeping pace with regulation

Asia’s regulatory environment is highly fragmented, with each jurisdiction setting its own transaction reporting and connectivity rules. MX.3 addresses this with its regulatory reporting engine, offering built-in workflows and business rules that allow banks to go live faster and stay aligned with evolving requirements.

“Clients value our deep regulatory expertise and the way we package updates,” Clout says. “They don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time a new rule comes in – we deliver preconfigured best practices and maintain them as regulations evolve.”

This approach has helped OCBC Bank implement multi-jurisdictional reporting across the US and Apac, cutting turnaround times and reducing operational risk. Murex has also delivered a fully integrated ISO 20022 solution to support Apac banks as they migrate to richer payment message formats, simplifying adoption and lowering total cost of ownership.

Localisation that matters

Murex’s long-standing presence in the Apac region means MX.3 can reflect local market conventions that global systems often overlook. “Many of our competitors focus on standardised US and European markets,” says Matthieu Avanthey, head of functional product for Apac at Murex. “Our solutions are designed to meet local market requirements from day one.”

In India, for example, Murex co-developed with Axis Bank a solution to automate overdue payment tracking and the reclassification of non-performing assets and non-performing investments – removing a previously manual and error-prone process. The solution is now being scaled to other Indian institutions as a best-practice package.

In Korea, Taiwan and Indonesia, the platform accommodates local market practices by recognising the profit and loss of securities transactions on the trade date, even when those transactions involve custom or non-standard settlement delays. This helps banks stay accurate while meeting local accounting standards.

Continuous innovation

Beyond meeting regulatory and market requirements, Murex has invested heavily in usability improvements. Its enhanced dashboard now displays related exceptions across queues, portfolios and counterparties in a single view, dramatically cutting resolution times.

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Through investments in Continuous Linked Settlement (CLS) connectivity – most recently, a CLSNet interface covering more than 120 currencies – this service enables clients to automate the full CLS workflow, from trade confirmation to settlement. “We continue to add features to keep pace with market infrastructure changes,” Clout says. “That means clients stay compliant and efficient without major reinvestment.”

Kim Dong-Kun, FX treasury team manager at Kakao Bank, says: “We are delighted to use MX.3 for managing our global securities inventory. The platform not only supports standard operations but also enables efficient handling of non-standard settlements … Overall, MX.3 gives us confidence to scale our business.”

Looking forward

Murex is now turning its attention to three key areas for operations teams: artificial intelligence, digital assets and deployment agility. AI is being embedded into document processing to automatically match paper confirmations and reduce manual work.

Digital asset support is expanding to allow clients to handle crypto trading, tokenised securities and stablecoin settlement in the same operating model as traditional products, with full reconciliation and custody integration.

Finally, Murex is accelerating deployment models for smaller institutions, offering pre-packaged best practices and software-as-a-service delivery to shorten time-to-value. Clout adds: “There’s huge interest from local and Islamic banks that want a cost-effective way to get to a best-practice operating model quickly.”

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