Atriax, the trading platform owned by the top three foreign exchange banks, says it is on schedule to roll out its automated forex pricing product in June.
The trading portal will open first for live trading just between its advisory board members, said Dan Morehead, chief executive officer of Atriax. We are going to start trading within a week or two between bank and advisory board members, he said, and in June we will launch our full autopricing product.
The former Chase Manhattan Corp., Citigroup Inc., Deutsche Bank, and Reuters Group PLC formed the foreign exchange marketplace last October. Sixty-five banks have since signed up to provide liquidity.
The group won a small victory last month when the former J.P. Morgan & Co., a founding member of FXall, a competing bank-owned foreign exchange trading system, switched allegiance to Atriax in light of its merger with Chase to form J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.
Robert Standing, managing director and head of rates markets for Europe at Morgan Chase, said in a statement that integration of Atriax into the firms dealing systems is at an advanced stage. We look forward to presenting the portal to our clients as J.P. Morgans multibank foreign exchange offering.
An Atriax spokesman said the consortium is delighted that J.P. Morgan Chase has clarified the issue and chosen Atriax as their multibank portal.
Atriax offers information on exchange rates, as well as news and research. The June rollout is to add real-time market data, automated pricing, and trading in 170 currencies through Reuters.
Eventually the foreign exchange marketplace will offer other asset classes, with money markets and deposits coming on this year, Mr. Morehead said. We have always said this is a multi-asset-class portal, he said. Right now all of the single-asset systems are going multibank, and in time many of the multibank but single-asset systems will have to merge in with other asset classes.
FXall, a principal competitor of Atriax, has signed up 31 banks and is also scheduling a second-quarter start-up. Philip Weisberg, chief executive officer of FXall, said, We have been testing our platform over the last few months with both customers and liquidity providers, and we are well down the testing route. As soon as we have completed testing and I anticipate completing the testing in the next few weeks we will go live.
Mr. Morehead said there would be room for both consortiums.
I think there will probably be a handful of foreign exchange portals that are found to be useful by both sides of the market, he said. Banks and clients have millions of different needs and will want to access their customers through several different systems.
I think ultimately customers are going to be the ones to decide how many platforms will remain, said Mr. Weisberg. Customers decisions will be based on systems reliability and comprehensiveness, he said.
If there are six platforms that serve a different segment, maybe there will be six. It depends on how well they serve a particular segment, Mr. Weisberg said.
