IHS Markit announced that MarkitSERV and Cobalt are collaborating to accelerate the delivery of post-trade processing services for foreign exchange (FX) markets based on blockchain technology. As part of its alliance with Cobalt, IHS Markit also made a strategic investment in the firm and will partner with Cobalt to sell and deliver the solution.
MarkitSERV and Cobalt will offer a shared post-trade infrastructure designed to replace legacy technology and manual processes, bringing increased efficiency and reduced operational risk to the FX market. The integration between MarkitSERV and Cobalt is already complete, with trade data flowing from customers and trading venues via MarkitSERV into the Cobalt platform.
The alliance unites MarkitSERV’s global network of over 800 FX counterparties and venues with Cobalt’s advanced back and middle office platform that uses a combination of shared ledger and low latency technology. It delivers a single, shared, immutable record for each trade which frees up back and middle office resources from multiple layers of reconciliation.
Chris Leaver, managing director and head of FX at MarkitSERV said in a statement: “The majority of the FX industry is already integrated with the MarkitSERV network and we now offer the community turn-key access to the Cobalt platform and the opportunity to radically streamline post-trade workflows. This partnership is a natural extension of MarkitSERV’s core strategy of centralizing and normalizing post-trade processing across all asset classes.”
Also commenting in the statement, Adrian Patten, co-founder and chairman, at Cobalt said: “For too long, FX has been burdened by an aging, inefficient post-trade environment. Our high-performance technology has been designed to replace legacy infrastructure and inefficient processes, as well as significantly slash cost and risk for this five trillion dollar a day market.”