In other FinTech news, the CFTC has closer ties with Canadian authorities, and a new NDF debuts.
London-based financial markets and commodities bank, ICBC Standard Bank, has selected Fenergo, a provider of know your customer (KYC) services, to meet global compliance requirements and to make improvements in operational efficiency, bank and officials say.
In February 2015, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Ltd. (ICBC) acquired a controlling stake in Standard Bank’s London-based global markets business, bank officials say. The acquisition included Standard Bank, the Standard Bank Group’s U.K. subsidiary, the primary legal entity in the U.K., and other international operations, officials say. Standard Bank was subsequently renamed ICBC Standard Bank.
The union of ICBC and Standard Bank “creates a platform to serve the growing demands of Chinese clients for global commodities, fixed income, currency and equities products while continuing as a distribution platform for African risk,” bank officials say.
ICBC Standard Bank specializes in global commodities, fixed income, currencies and equities. Headquartered in London, the bank has operations in Dubai, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore, New York, and Tokyo.
The Fenergo Client Lifecycle Management platform is intended to provide ICBC Standard Bank with “a highly optimized process” for regulatory onboarding, entity data management and client management for institutional, corporate and private banks, vendor officials say.
Fenergo integrates many industry and AML data providers and KYC utilities to “consume, process and route this data to all internal and downstream trading systems,” says Oliver White, UK head of sales for Fenergo, in a prepared statement. “This creates a true single view of the client … all on a single platform.”
CFTC Extends MOU for Canadian Authorities
CFTC Chairman Timothy Massad and authorities in three Canadian provinces have endorsed Counterparts to a 2014 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) about “cooperation and the exchange of information in the supervision and oversight of regulated entities that operate on a cross-border basis in the United States and in Canada,” CFTC officials say.
The extension of the MOU is “in the interest of fulfilling their respective regulatory mandates,” CFTC officials say. The MOU was originally executed on March 25, 2014. “The scope of the MOU includes markets and organized trading platforms, central counterparties, trade repositories, and intermediaries, dealers, and other market participants.”
Massad signed the counterparts to the MOU with Canadian officials: Peter Klohn, chair of the financial and consumer services commission in New Brunswick; Roger Sobotkiewicz, chairperson of the financial and consumer affairs authority of Saskatchewan; and Paul E. Radford, chair of the Nova Scotia Securities Commission.
EBS BrokerTec Adds NDF Offering
EBS BrokerTec, the market-leading electronic foreign exchange (FX) and fixed income business of the interdealer ICAP, has added a new, non-deliverable forward (NDF) instrument – one month against the fix, to be called TOD/TOM in response to customer demand.
The new NDF will be offered via EBS Market, central limit order book for liquidity in NDFs. The EBS Market “is increasingly the source for reference rates in a number of core NDF currencies including Indian rupee and Korean won,” officials add.
The new TOD/TOM product will offer straight through processing, trade auditing processes and pre-screened credit, EBS BrokerTec officials say. “In the first phase of the launch customers will initially be able to trade Off-SEF instruments across Asian NDFs. On-SEF instruments and Latin American NDFs will be offered in subsequent months.”
EBS Market is offering a solution for “trading today (TOD) and tomorrow’s (TOM) fixing against the one month,” say EBS officials. The EBS Market platform provides matching engines, an audit trail and straight through processing.
“Since 2012, trading on the one month outright on EBS Market has seen strong growth,” EBS officials say. “The new TOD/TOM product is a complementary instrument to the one-month outright and together they represent a meaningful part of the overall NDF market.”
EBS BrokerTec has “taken the lead in automating what has until now been a very manual process, and believe the new TOD/TOM product will fit seamlessly with the existing NDF offering,” says Darryl Hooker, co-head of EBS BrokerTec Markets, in a statement. “In particular, we see real interest from clients already trading in the one-month outright product.”
Need a Reprint?