London-headquartered Siege, the operator of dark pools for foreign exchange (forex), announced on Monday the launch of NetFix, the company’s new service for providing anonymous spot FX matching.
As described by the company itself, the new service provides an anonymous mechanism to match offsetting fixing orders in advance of the publication of an FX benchmark. In addition, it is providing a fully automated session matching.
The anonymity of the participants is ensured as NetFix is connected to a prime broker bank, which is acting as a central counterparty for each matched trade. The company did not name its prime broker banking partner but highlighted that it is a 'top tier' industry name.
Siege is further claiming that the NetFix clients, which are banks and other institutions, can receive early access to liquidity and benefit from zero-information leakage and reduced trading congestion within Fix calculation windows.
“NetFix™ delivers innovation in Spot FX Fixing, allowing all participants to place orders on an anonymous basis, using different matching rounds before the publication of a Fix,” said Claude Goulet, the CEO of Siege.
“Driven by the needs of our Working Group of banks and buy-side firms, we have launched a service which improves fixing workflows for all parties, cuts transaction costs and delivers high rates of automation using our robust and secure core matching engine and low latency messaging infrastructure.”
Tried and Tested
The service was launched after Siege executed early spot trades among a group of early participants in July using the WMR 4pm Fix.
The official press release highlighted that NetFix is supporting all currency pairs. Also, the fixing rate on the platform is unknown until the publication of the FIX, but the filled orders are binding.
“Our first service, Siege MidPool is already connected to more than 50 buy- and sell-side firms, and most of the major FX trading platforms, so we expect these participants to onboard to NetFix quickly,” Goulet added.
