Standard Chartered: CEP for FX
February 2, 2009
Standard Chartered has bolstered its foreign exchange trading desks with complex event processing (CEP) technology supplied by Progress Software Corp.'s Apama division.
On Jan. 21, the London-based bank announced it had gone live with the Apama FX Market Aggregation Accelerator, a composite CEP development platform that combines forex integration adaptors, trading dashboards and customizable algorithms. The system is currently providing Standard Chartered traders in London, New York, Singapore and Dubai with a consolidated view of liquidity on five FX trading platforms.
Citing improved price discovery and better fills, Todd McDonald, Standard Chartered's global head of FX electronic pricing and trading, said that "with the aggregated view that Apama provides, our traders have a much better picture of an FX market that has become increasingly fragmented over the last few years." McDonald noted that the bank was able to integrate and deploy the FX platform, which Apama introduced in June 2007, in three months.
Giles Nelson, senior director of strategy at Bedford, Mass.-based Progress Apama, pointed to the ease with which traders can modify algorithmic strategies as a reason for Standard Chartered's selection. Using Java-based development tools, traders can quickly change the parameters of their algorithms in response to fluctuations in currency positions, liquidity and pricing depth. Apama's FX aggregation product has ten clients so far, according to Nelson.
The implementation, he added, allows Standard Chartered to "start thinking about using complex event processing in other trading areas" such as bond pricing. "With our out-of-the-box FX aggregator, the bank will also have easy access to our underlying CEP platform, allowing them to do many other things."
