Continuous linked settlement
| Edge Act Corporation | |
| Industry | Banking, financial services |
| Founded | 2002 |
| Headquarters | New York |
|
Area served
|
Worldwide |
| Website | www |
CLS (originally Continuous Linked Settlement) is a specialist US financial institution that provides settlement services to its members in the foreign exchange market (FX). Although the forex market is decentralised and has no central exchange or clearing facility, firms that chose to use CLS to settle their FX transactions can mitigate the settlement risk associated with their trades.
CLS does this through the operation of a payment versus payment (PvP) settlement service which mitigates settlement risk for the FX transactions of its settlement members and their customers (third parties).
The service started operating in 2002 as an Edge Act Corporation, a limited purpose bank regulated by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Since it began operations in 2002, CLS has rapidly increased and by Mar 2017 was settling just over 50% of global FX transactions. As a result, the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) officially designated CLS a Systemically Important Financial Market Utility in July 2012.
The single day record for gross-value settlement, set on 19 March 2008, stands at US$10.3 trillion, for 1,113,464 payment instructions. The single day record for gross-volume settlement, set on 28 May 2013, is 1,992,652.
In 2002 CLS was launched with 39 Members and seven currencies. As of November 2015 CLS settles 18 Currencies, has 74 Shareholders, 64 Settlement Members and over 9,000 active Third Party participants.
CLS operates a global multi-currency cash settlement system through which settlement risk can be mitigated with finality using a combination of PvP settlement over CLS central bank accounts, local real-time gross settlements systems (RTGS) and multilateral payment netting supported by a resilient infrastructure.
In a PvP system both sides’ payment instructions for a FX transaction are settled simultaneously. Without PvP there is a serious risk that one party to a FX transaction will deliver the currency it owes, but not receive the other currency from its counterparty, resulting in the loss of principal. This is known as settlement risk, or “Herstatt Risk”, after the German bank, Bankhaus Herstatt, which collapsed in June 1974 leaving many of its FX counterparties with significant losses.
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Wikipedia