CLS Group, the market infrastructure provider of risk mitigation services to the global FX market, has published its operating metrics for the month of March. These show that Q1 2018 has been a record for CLS with the highest traded volumes submitted to the service ever, topping Q1 2013.
Average daily traded volume submitted to CLS by product (USD trillion) |
March 2017 | February 2018 | March 2018 |
Swap | 1.039 | 1.307 | 1.272 |
Spot | 0.462 | 0.542 | 0.480 |
Forward | 0.095 | 0.100 | 0.103 |
Total average daily traded volume submitted to CLS (USD trillion) | 1.596 | 1.949 | 1.855 |
David Puth, CEO at CLS, commented:
While February’s volatility caught significant attention, we have observed a strong underlying trend towards higher volumes throughout the first quarter. Average daily USD volume in Q1 2018 was USD1.87 trillion, compared to the previous record of USD1.67 trillion in Q1 2013.
There are a number of drivers that have led to this outcome, not least of which is the rising trend of the buy-side becoming more actively involved in managing settlement risk. Today, most of the world’s largest asset managers use CLS, as clients of our members, to manage settlement exposure. This has materially improved liquidity management while allowing buyside participants to reduce operational errors in the 18 currencies in which we settle. The additional volume of transactions has had the added benefit of reducing the cost of incremental transactions to all of our clients. In 2017, over 90% of our new business growth came from third party business.
Having proven that the PvP model can deliver a safer and more stable foreign exchange market, we are also experiencing increased growth and interest for CLS services in new territories. For example, within the last twelve months, we have seen our first ever activity from third party participants in Korea, our first Japanese non-bank financial institution, new activity from Latin America (Columbia and Chile) and we look to welcome our first settlement member bank from Mexico very soon.