While Lloyds has been a third-party customer of CLS for several years, it has decided to join the 62-member group to benefit from streamlined and standardized FX settlement processes. Later this month Lloyds will officially launch its electronic platform, Arena, and it has made a series of key hires, in London and New York over the summer.
Lloyds is seeking to boost its market share in the FX markets beyond its traditional base of corporate clients to real money and institutional investors. In this year’s Euromoney FX Survey, Lloyds improved nine places to 38th position in the global rankings, with a market share of 0.16%.
Earlier this week, CLS said average daily values of FX trades settled fell from the previous month, though year-on-year they had risen 24%. In the same month its aggregation service processed almost 210,000 instructions, with an average compression ratio of 94.6%. On July 12, it handled a record 396,000 instructions, and compressed them to 13,698 trades.