The yet-to-be-named trade aggregation service launched by CLS and Icap-subsidiary Traiana in April received a fillip this week when Goldman Sachs became the latest bank to say it will support it. It joins the seven founder banks: Bank of America; Credit Suisse; Citi; Deutsche Bank; JPMorgan; Morgan Stanley and Royal Bank of Scotland.

It has happened to every provider of electronic trading platforms, but that doesn’t lessen the embarrassment of a system crash. This week, it was the turn of UBS, whose FXTrader went down on Tuesday. “During a programme of major systems enhancements, we experienced a rare outage yesterday in one of our FX systems, which resulted in a period of reduced service for some clients. The impacted clients were promptly informed and normal service was swiftly resumed once the problem had been rectified,” is the official spin. What I hear is that the platform went down, came back up briefly, and then crashed again, resulting in a downtime of around a couple of hours.

FXall says it has upgraded its matching algorithms and Accelor technology, the backbones of its Order Book and FXall trading platforms, with the result that peak order capacity has been increased by 50% and tail latencies, which impact client execution speed at the 95th percentile, have been reduced. I don’t have any idea what the last bit means either, but it sounds impressive. The result is that mean order latency has been reduced by 75% and average take-out latency by 40%.

In a move that has seen him return to Paternoster Square – the home of EBS before it was bought out by Icap – Jack Jeffery, who left option specialist SuperDerivatives in July, started this week as the chief executive elect of leading government bond platform MTS. The company is now part of the London Stock Exchange Group and it seems a little ironic that Jeffery is working there, seeing he had no dialogue with the exchange when he was one of its tenants during his time at EBS. Still, the LSE is a very different company now than it was then and no doubt Jeffery will enjoy his new role.

It may have only ranked 30th in the 2009 Euromoney FX poll, but there is no doubting the potential might of Santander. The bank ranked as the seventh-largest in the world in terms of market capitalization in 2008, which only underlines its underperformance as an FX player. However, that is all apparently going to change and as part of its planned build-up Santander has hired Marco Pelizzoli, who quit Bank of America Merrill Lynch last month, to spearhead its ecommerce push. Pelizzoli will start in early November.

RBC Capital Markets has hired Stefanie Holtze as a director in FX sales. Holtze will report to Natasha Brook-Walters, managing director and global head of institutional FX sales, and Tony Tse, director and head of sales, Asia ex-Japan, and will be based in Hong Kong. Previously, Holtze has spent time at JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup in Frankfurt, as well as RBC in London.

Peregrine Hood, the heir apparent to the Duke of Bronté and Viscount Bridport, has quit his role at BNP Paribas in hedge fund sales and supposedly trotted across London to Morgan Stanley. They used to say FX was full of barrow boys.

A new ‘currency’ was launched yesterday, when the WDX Organization used its synthetic Wocu – world currency unit – to buy some plonk on the Bordeaux Wine Exchange. The symbolic trade will, WDX hopes, lead to swift acceptance and use of the Wocu as an international global unit of account.

Bank of America/Merrill Lynch has apparently hired Doug Horlich to run FX Sales North America and Emerging Markets from Goldman Sachs.

When I was at Midland, we had a trainee we nicknamed “Perf” because, while he thought he was perfect, he was really a complete and utter jub. I don’t know whatever happened to him, but I did suspect it was him who’d sent in the CV.

I’m often accused, unfairly, with having a puerile obsession with the Second World War. It’s just that I think history often repeats itself. When I see parallels in the financial markets with events from 70 years ago, I just can’t resist mentioning them. Anyway, this week saw the Anschluss, I mean union by name, of Commerzbank Corporates & Markets and Dresdner Kleinwort. The move formalises yet another bout of consolidation, which as Mark Warms pointed out in his article last week, remains one of the dominant factors in FX.

FXCM has launched a series of contracts for difference on equity indices, oil and precious metals, as well as FX.

GFI and the Quick Corporation of Japan have extended their agreement to distribute the US broker’s FX options data to the Japanese data vendor’s clients by a further two years from October 1. As a result of the extension, Quick’s clients will now be able to download GFI’s data into their own systems and perform analysis. “Quick is pleased to enter into a new agreement with GFI, which opens the way for our customers to use GFI market data outside of the Quick terminal and allow them more flexibility. We believe this will certainly help us to catch up with increasingly diversified requirements of our clients today,” says Yasunori Hanamiya, executive general manager of Quick.

The focus on credit, as well as a degree of regulatory uncertainty, appears to have led to an increase in the importance of sales to financial institutions, according to sources at major FX houses. The reasoning is that banks are happy to assume counterparty risk with other banks and FIs, particularly in emerging markets, but less willing to trade directly with buy-side counterparties. Another issue is the uncertainty surrounding the legitimacy of some derivative products – whether or not they have been missold has led banks to effectively seek to have credit disintermediated.

No, it’s not an exam question, just a rhetorical question. This week, the FSA has, according to the Financial Times, “fired a warning shot across London’s share markets, calling on trading firms to be alert to a practice known as ‘spoofing’, which the regulator fears could be a form of market abuse.”

Vendor RCP, which is best known for the solutions it provides to control operational risk around Reuters conversational dealing, has launched a new product suite to monitor credit risk.

Turnover held up well in August, given that most of the market seemed to be on holiday. The CME said turnover in FX averaged 616,000 contracts a day, or a notional $79 billion. This was a 7% decline on August 2008, but almost identical to July 2009. Thomson Reuters’ spot volumes were also steady, averaging around $116 billion a day, versus $118 billion in July. Over at Icap, average daily volume on the EBS platform came in at $122.3 billion, compared with $125 billion in July.

In testimony yesterday (Thursday) to the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission/Securities and Exchange Commission joint meeting on regulatory harmonisation in the US, National Futures Association chief executive Dan Roth stated that the main issue around customer protection was not multiple regulators, but a clear framework of what exactly they are regulating.

The evolution of the still relatively juvenile retail FX market took another step forward this week with Gain Capital’s announcement that it is to hold an initial public offering.

On Wednesday Ben Welsh, former head of fixed income, commodities and currencies at UniCredit Markets & Investment Banking, started at JPMorgan as managing director, proprietary trading, in the bank’s commodity group. Bizarrely, JPM, which recently made a big fuss when it lost several of its team from the very same area to Barclays, declined to comment. Makes me wonder if I should report the bank to the FSA. In the meantime, chances must be high that Welsh will soon be joined by former colleague Dan O’Sullivan, former global head of FX trading at UniCredit.

Charlotte-based Advanced Markets has hired John Moran as chief operating officer from Genworth Financial and Joseph McDonough as head of global FX sales and market research. Both report to the firm’s CEO Anthony Brocco.

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange has appointed Laurent Paulhac as managing director, over-the-counter products and services. Paulhac, who will report to Rick Redding, the exchange’s managing director, products and services, is responsible for leading the development, execution and management of CME’s global OTC business strategy. He will be based in New York.

As part of a boost to its AES FX sales efforts, Credit Suisse has relocated David Byne from London to New York. Byne will be replaced by Ben Weinberg, who joins the bank at the end of September from SuperDerivatives, where Byne also once worked.

By Mark Warms, General manager of FXall's European operations. The constantly evolving FX market is once again entering a period of change that is potentially so significant that many participants are openly talking about the emergence of a new trading paradigm.

By Simon Derrick, head of currency research at The Bank Of New York Mellon.

While there is no doubt that a diversification of global currency reserves or the introduction of an alternative reserve currency would be momentous, they are far from being immediate risks. In our view the market is focusing on the wrong issue. By Ian Stannard, senior currency strategist, BNP Paribas.

In a way, a debate over alpha and beta separation – a debate that happened in equity fund management 20 years ago – is indicative of the arrival of currency as genuine source of return. James Binny, head of Index Research, RBS Global Banking and Markets

I love a headline full of hyperbollox (Do you mean hyperbole?, Ed). A raft of data confirms what we all know: there has been a significant fall in turnover in FX everywhere. In New York, the Foreign Exchange Committee’s (FXC’s) 10th survey of North American FX volume found that the average daily volume in total over-the-counter FX instruments – including spot transactions, outright forwards, FX swaps and options – totalled $527 billion, a decrease of 26.3% on April 2008. Disturbingly, this was the lowest level of activity since October 2005. The FXC says the declines were across currency pairs and instruments. Average daily turnover in spot fell 25.2% to $294 billion; outright forwards dropped 21.5% to $73.8 billion; swaps declined 27% to $141.8 billion; and, more tellingly, option volumes plunged 48.4% to just $17.76 billion.

Chris Hansen has swapped his role as head of Deutsche’s institutional client group Europe to head the bank’s FX prime brokerage operations. Hansen will be based in London.

South Korea’s financial regulator, the Financial Services Commission has decided to increase margin requirements on retail FX trading from 2% to 5%. The move, effective on September 1, is largely as a result of the high rate of losses among retail investors. The FSC says that the vast majority – more than 90% – of retail accounts incurred losses.