CLS, a financial market infrastructure delivering settlement, processing and data solutions, today announces that it has won two FX Markets Asia 2020 Awards for its leading FX settlement service, CLSSettlement, and its suite of market data products, CLSMarketData.

CLSSettlement is CLS’s payment-versus-payment (PvP) system, which makes settlement more safe, efficient, and cost-effective. On average, CLS settles over USD5.5 trillion of payment instructions per day across 18 currencies, accounting for a large proportion of FX trades in the global market. CLS’s FX settlement service is available directly to its 70-plus settlement members and indirectly, through third-party service providers, to over 25,000 third-party clients including funds, banks, corporates, non-bank financial institutions and multinational corporations.

As the largest settlement risk mitigation provider in the FX market, CLS is uniquely placed to offer a comprehensive view of global FX trading activity in a highly fragmented market through CLSMarketData, a comprehensive suite of FX alternative data products. Comprised of CLS’s volume and volume-derived datasets, these data products leverage the details of over 1 billion trades across the 18 most actively traded global currencies, including Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand. Their depth and breadth of market coverage – both historically and currently, with intraday offerings – provide an invaluable resource to clients. The data products are platform-agnostic, and they support a broad range of applications, including trade modeling, predictive analytics, optimizing execution models, transaction cost analysis, market positioning and risk management.

Margaret Law, Head of Client Management, APAC at CLS, said: “In Asia, a key aim for CLS has been to increase settlement risk mitigation in the FX industry through growing buy-side participation in CLSSettlement. Our latest regional growth figures demonstrate this strategy’s success. In Asia, adoption of CLSSettlement by the FX community gained significant momentum over the last year, with 3% settlement growth overall in APAC and 16% growth for third parties. The major tier-one banks in the region already use CLSSettlement. Our focus is to continue to broaden participation in CLSSettlement and expand adoption of CLS’s other solutions to further mitigate risk and deliver operational and funding efficiencies for market participants.” 

Masami Johnstone, Head of Information Services at CLS, commented on the data award: “When the impact of Covid-19 became apparent earlier this year, we made a conscious decision to help market participants with data science-driven market insights. The pandemic has highlighted the importance of market transparency as the need to understand rapidly changing market dynamics has accelerated. CLS has a key role to play with its broad FX market data coverage.

“I am pleased that our efforts to serve the FX community have been recognized by this award. Our data science team continues to work on new data products to provide our clients with new market insights during this challenging time.”