The electronic FX unit of ICAP picks a Friend to be head of its market surveillance and enforcement operation. UBS to provide liquidity to FXSpotStream. Bank of America Merrill Lynch rolls out services to handle regulatory requirements for cross-border transactions. MarkitServ opens center for pre-trade credit checks. Then, there was the “diesel boom.”
EBS: The electronic FX trading platform of interdealer broker ICAP said it named Simon Friend as its Head of Market Surveillance.
Friend will lead development of the EBS Market Surveillance and Enforcement operation that oversees its pool of liquidity in currencies.
Friend has been a senior associate in the Transaction Monitoring Unit of the United Kingdom’s Financial Services Authority.
Before that, he held a number of compliance and surveillance positions at broking and trading firms.
FXSpotStream: The electronic communications network subsidiary of LiquidityMatch said UBS is now providing liquidity.
UBS becomes the seventh bank providing liquidity to FXSpotStream. The others include Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, Commerzbank AG, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley.
The majority of LiquidityMatch shareholders are also liquidity providing banks of FXSpotStream.
FXSpotStream aggregates liquidity for spot FX trades.
Bank of America Merrill Lynch: The brokerage business of Bank of America rolled out online services to help institutions deal with cross-border payments as outlined by the Dodd-Frank Remittance Regulation 1073 (DF-1073). The services, first brought out six months ago, now have customizable features and will be updated when the final rule is published by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
The products incude FXtransact White Label and Information Exchange for Payments. These provide clients with access to fee, tax, availability date and other key information on foreign exchange and other cross-border transactions.
MarkitServ: The trade processor said it launched a pre-trade credit checking service for over-the-counter derivatives transactions.
The service will help buy-side firms as interest-rate and credit-default-swap transactions move onto centrally cleared execution facilities, as mandated by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act.
Buy-side firms, regional banks and other institutions will get a consolidated view of the credit available to them from their futures commissions merchants. This will help institutions determine how to deploy their credit lines among multiple clearing venues.
The service can also be used for checking and managing credit lines required for off-facility voice and block trades, as well.
The Credit Centre will initially check credit for trades in OTC credit, foreign exchange and rates. The service will use Tradexpress technology from Cinnober.
Diesel Boom: The chair of the European Union is formally named Jeroen René Victor Anton Dijsselbloem .
But the 46-year-old now goes by the popular title “Diesel Boom,’’ after the blowback he achieved on currency markets Monday.
He detonated a grenade by saying the take-a-piece-of-depositors’-bank-accounts approach to solving the Cyprus financial crisis would “serve as a template” for solving such crises elsewhere (presumably in European places such as Spain or Greece or Italy).
That stopped markets in their tracks and by the end of the day Dijseelbloem was trying different forms of taking back what he said.
