IHS Markit’s MarkitSERV and Cobalt are collaborating to deliver new post-trade processing services for foreign exchange (FX) markets.
As part of its alliance with Cobalt, IHS Markit has also made an investment in the firm and will partner with Cobalt to sell and deliver the solution.
MarkitSERV and Cobalt will offer a shared post-trade infrastructure designed to replace legacy technology and manual processes, increasing efficiency and reducing operational risk to the FX market.
The partnership brings together MarkitSERV’s network of FX counterparties and venues with Cobalt’s back- and middle-office platform which uses a combination of the shared ledger and low latency technology.
It delivers a single, shared, immutable record for each trade which, according to IHS Markit, frees up back and middle office resources from reconciliation.
The integration between MarkitSERV and Cobalt is already complete, with trade data flowing from customers and trading venues via MarkitSERV into the Cobalt platform.
Chris Leaver, managing director and head of FX at MarkitSERV, said: “This collaboration marks the start of a major transformation in FX infrastructure. This partnership is a natural extension of MarkitSERV’s core strategy of centralising and normalising post-trade processing across all asset classes.”
Adrian Patten, co-founder and chairman, at Cobalt, commented: “Joining forces with IHS Markit will allow us to rapidly scale our solution and deliver a state of the art shared middle- and back- office infrastructure to the global FX community, dramatically improving efficiency across the board.”
He added: “For too long, FX has been burdened by an ageing, inefficient post-trade environment. Our high-performance technology has been designed to replace legacy infrastructure and inefficient processes, as well as significantly slash cost and risk for this five trillion dollar a day market.”
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