Citi and JPMC days away from FX Connect integration

The integration of Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase on State Street's FX Connect is only days away, said Simon Wilson-Taylor, managing director of Global Link.

"Some trades have already taken place, and both banks should be trading globally by the end of this month," Wilson-Taylor, whose unit oversees FX Connect, told RiskNews' sister publication Trading Technology Week.

Most clients reach FX Connect over private networks with transaction servers on-site, with the internet serving as backup. The basic technology is proprietary publish-subscribe running on Unix architecture on Oracle parallel servers.

No extra hardware was needed to accommodate the influx of volume from Citi and JP Morgan Chase, Wilson-Taylor said, citing 250 servers at three data centres, with about 500 servers at client sites globally.

Wilson-Taylor said the banks’ decision to join FX Connect was not spontaneous, and the work of installing equipment at putative client sites began well before pen was put to paper. "We’ve been planning this for some time," Wilson-Taylor said.

Banks connect to FX Connect via a Windows GUI thin client, although an API (applicaton programme interface) is available for connection to banks’ auto-pricing engines. So far, none of the 34 banks on the platform have used the API, Wilson-Taylor said.

He added: "A lot of customers either don’t have technology they can plug into the API or they don’t have the money to spend, so, for our part, we are taking on those investments and integrating with existing technology," Wilson-Taylor said.

Clients can load confirmations from third-party vendors such as Crossmar’s FX Match, as well as State Street’s Global Treasury Support Service (GTSS), an online confirm-affirm system that aggregates notices from FX Connect as well as non-electronic or off-system trades.