Trading Newsflashes: Lava Plans Interbank FX Platform, and more

Lava to Launch Interbank FX Platform Lava Trading, a subsidiary of Citigroup, announced a major initiative to introduce an interbank foreign exchange trading platform.

The new offering, built upon Lava's proprietary technology core, will provide the interbank community with a variety of sophisticated order types, full depth of book and functionality for electronic foreign exchange trading.

The new platform will also allow banks to shift large positions quickly and quietly among themselves within a "blind" system. The Lava platform will be available via the Internet or leased lines later this year.

"This initiative represents the next evolution in interbank trading, providing features and advanced technology that are simply nonexistent in today's market," said David Ogg, CEO of LavaFX, in a release. "Lava's platform will provide unique functions and advanced order types, and superior methods of harvesting liquidity, providing the interbank community with offerings that are used extensively on the buy side."

Lava's announcement comes just days after inderdealer broker ICAP agreed to acquire foreign exchange trading platform EBS for a cash payment of $775 million. EBS is owned by a group of 13 major banks, including Lava parent Citiigroup.

BNY Brokerage Forms New Hedge Fund Unit

BNY Brokerage, a subsidiary of The Bank of New York, has formed a new unit to provide the hedge fund community with electronic trading tools, commission management services and independent research.

The new unit will handle sales, marketing and trading and will be led by Mark Perdigao, managing director, formerly of the firm's institutional sales group.

"Hedge funds are increasingly receptive to our ability to deliver comprehensive, conflict-free brokerage solutions with sophisticated trading tools, customized and specialized research, and transparency in commission pricing within an agency-based model. This new unit will help us concentrate more resources on meeting the specialized needs of this rapidly growing market segment and accelerate our growth in this area," said Carey Pack, president of BNY Brokerage, in a release.

Bank of New York says that the creation of the new unit is the latest move to enhance its offerings to this sophisticated client segment. The bank currently holds more than $65 billion in hedge fund assets under administration.

Morgan Stanley Selects Thunderhead to Automate OTC Derivative Trade Confirmation

Morgan Stanley has selected Thunderhead's Document Generation Framework to help automate the creation of its over-the-counter (OTC) derivative trade confirmations.

The firm expects Thunderhead's off-the-shelf solution to streamline the trade confirmation process while reducing operational risk and delivering business user control to improve the time required to reach the document confirmation stage.

As a result of its open standards architecture, Morgan Stanley will be able to integrate Thunderhead with its trade confirm architecture to meet aggressive project time scales. The implementation will enable multiple business groups to create and maintain trade templates, reducing the usual costs associated with manual document creation and amendments.