Currenex and XRT unveil joint venture

Currenex, the online global currency exchange, and French-based financial services vendor, XRT, have agreed a deal that will see Currenex integrate its online forex platform with XRT’s collaborative treasury management (CTM) solutions.

The integration will be facilitated by Currenex’s FXintegrate program, a suite of standards-based integration solutions that supports the FX trading lifecycle and provides straight-through processing (STP) for customers.

The merger of XRT and FXintegrate will offer clients increased speed, efficiency and streamlining of forex deals through the automation of trade record updates and the elimination of the need to re-key data, the companies claimed.

“We’ve already done this type of integration with many of the treasury management system providers over the last 18 months,” said Roddy Boulton, managing director, EMEA, of Currenex. “The integration will be done on a customer-by-customer basis according to the protocol laid down by the treasury workstation integration standards team (Twist) working group.”

Currenex offers various levels of integration to customers depending on the particular version of the XRT product they are running. According to Boulton, the most complicated integration cases do not take more than a few weeks.

The XRT-Currenex collaboration has important risk implications for users. “From an electronic trading perspective, the integrity of the Currenex platform is ensured by the use of 128-bit encryption, an audit trail and the prerequisite for both buy-side and sell-side users to possess digital certificates in order to access the service,” said Boulton. A large degree of op risk has also been eliminated as the integration obviates the re-keying of data.

“In integrating our CTM solutions with Currenex’s services, our customers gain critical time in their currency trading, but, most importantly, operational risk in re-keying transactions is practically eliminated,” said XRT executive vice-president, Christian Tessier.