Reaction to FCA and BOE Post-trade Working Group
![Reaction to FCA and BOE Post-trade Working Group Reaction to FCA and BOE Post-trade Working Group](https://financialit.net/sites/default/files/adrian_patten_co-founder_and_chairman_of_cobalt.png)
- Adrian Patten, Co-founder and Chairman at Cobalt
- 10.05.2019 11:00 am Post-trade
It’s positive to see the FCA and Bank of England take an interest in issues with current post-trade infrastructure and look at the cost and benefits of alternative approaches.
Post-trade FX today relies on cumbersome, manual processes and aged technology which pose significant operational and systemic risk to the FX market. A single FX trade today creates multiple records for all parties, introducing inconsistencies throughout lifecycle events. We predict one trade can be replicated over 30 times within post-trade operations today and that there can be 20+ vendors involved in the process. This adds unnecessary complexity, cost and mistakes.
FX market participants realise the risk associated with the current state of post-trade infrastructure and service providers and have wanted a solution for years. The answer lies in technology which wasn’t available 15 years ago when current post-trade processes were designed. Shared ledger technology matches all versions of a trade into a single ‘trusted copy, freeing up back and middle office resources from multiple layers of reconciliation; generating one immutable data set of FX transactions from which to provide multiple services. Not only does this reduce risk, it also can create savings of up to 80%.