Fidessa, a large publicly traded (LON:FDSA) provider of trading solutions to financial institutions, announced that it has added FX trading capabilities to its buy-side Workstation execution platform. Fidessa’s Workstation already sits on the desks of more than 2,700 buy-side clients, connecting them to 650 brokers in 160 markets worldwide. Now those clients can also trade FX via the Workstation, which is delivered as a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution.
ActForex, which provides retail trading platforms, added a non-retail firm as a new client. FCStone, a US-based live executable liquidity source, will now be available globally on the ActForex platform, via brokers which run on ActForex’s software. By our estimation, the largest retail firm running ActForex software is Ireland-based AvaFX, a member of LeapRate’s Approved List of Forex trading firms.
Traiana, which provides software to automate post-trade processing of financial transactions, announced that it has become the first provider to be certified by CME Group for the submission of OTC FX Derivatives for clearing. Traiana customers can now clear OTC FX derivatives using its Harmony CCP Connect solution. Traiana is owned by ICAP, which bought Traiana in late 2007 for $247 million. ICAP’s Forex volumes have been dropping lately, due (in our estimation) to a combination of falling industry volumes and loss of market share (more on that here). Traiana continues to be led by its founding management group (a testament to ICAP management, which has managed to keep the talented Traiana people around even five years after the acquisition, a rarity in tech buyouts), including CEO Gil Mandelzis.
Boston Technologies‘ prime brokerage arm Boston Prime (formerly BT Prime) announced that it received FSA authorization and registration in the UK.