Bank of Ireland opts for Integral STP over client e-trading

Bank of Ireland has taken Integral’s AutoDealer product to aid straight-through processing, the Californian software firm said earlier this week. But, said an official at Bank of Ireland in Dublin, the bank has no immediate plans to use the system to offer online FX trading to its customers.

“At the moment there are no plans to add online FX trading because it’s not particularly high on people’s agenda – there’s no big demand for it here,” said Lorcan Connolly, director of information technology at Bank of Ireland Treasury and International Banking. “What we’ve purchased is the back-end margin engine capability. It is primarily internally focused to allow STP and the elimination of paper.”

Integral’s solution will enable STP for a number of channels, promote price consistency and allow for lower operational risks and costs, he added. It will also provide the infrastructure to deploy client trading over the Web should the bank decide to do so in the future.

Bank of Ireland, which is currently still in the implementation phase, will use the product to manage its internal and branch-dealing network globally. Once live, Integral will provide a central source for foreign exchange rates distribution at the bank’s trading floor in Dublin, with connections to appropriate Bank of Ireland systems to provide instant rate responses to its global branch network.

Users will be able to log in over a browser and submit trade requests over the system and get them electronically priced, executed and fed into their core risk systems, said Harpal Sandhu, president and chief executive officer of Integral in Mountain View, California.

“Bank of Ireland is quite progressive in its understanding that most of the positive effect of technology is in the cost-savings of streamlining their internal operation,” he told RiskNews’ sister publication FX Week. “It has thousands of branches and multiple channels that it distributes products through, and multiple groups within the bank that distribute FX products - all of them call the FX desk through one means or another to get prices from a trader who gives them out largely manually – this is labour-intensive, costly and prone to error because it doesn’t automatically feed the risk systems.

Although the system has been built for foreign exchange, it could be extended for new products, such as money markets in the future, said Sandhu.

Bank of Ireland currently provides liquidity to the Currenex multi-bank FX portal by inputting prices manually.

UFJ Holdings is the only other announced AutoDealer client, but Integral counts 37 banks on its wider client list, including CitiFX, Deutsche Bank and ABN Amro.