More than 20 South African clients went live on the IRESS South African Futures Exchange (SAFEX) trading and deal management solution yesterday (29 April).
IRESS’ SAFEX front-end was developed in response to the JSE’s Integrated Trading and Clearing (ITaC) initiative that sees the migration of the JSE derivatives and cash bond markets onto the exchange’s MillenniumIT trading platform and the migration of these markets onto the Cinnober Real‐Time Clearing (RTC) solution.
The JSE will no longer be providing member firms with the Nutron trading and clearing front-end, choosing instead to open this market to third-party software providers such as IRESS.
Leveraging the functionality of the IRESS Order System (IOS+), clients have access to a comprehensive and flexible integrated trading solution with multi-asset, multi-market order routing, execution management and post trade processing. The SAFEX front-end, coupled with IRESS IOS+, will enable seamless access to MIT’s data, and international fundamental and technical market data for trading, and the Cinnober RTC for deal management.
Shaun Nicholson, head of South African financial markets at IRESS, comments: “As a strategic technology partner to the JSE, we’re excited to offer SAFEX trading and deal management to the stockbroking community. It provides for a single, scalable, fully hosted and managed solution that creates cost efficiencies, while meeting the challenges of trading in today’s complex marketplace.”
To provide clients with a deal management solution, IRESS has partnered with SecuritEase in South Africa. The SecuritEase System is a realtime multi-currency, multi-market, multi-asset class settlement and accounting system with an integrated multi-currency, multi-company general ledger.
Bill Tonkin, MD of SecuritEase, says: “We are committed to the South African banking and finance industry for the long term through our partnership with IRESS. We believe that our product set for stockbroking is extremely relevant to the South African market. That relevance and commitment have been demonstrated by being able to take a piece of existing SecuritEase derivatives settlement system functionality and develop the EMAPI interface and other customisation specific to the South African market to make a JSE accredited ITaC product.”
In addition to front-end trading and deal management functionality, all IRESS clients can leverage the IRESS SmartHub, a global trade messaging network, for electronic order routing and direct market access via FIX globally.