BNY Mellon and ING have joined the list of top global banks that have partnered with financial market infrastructure company CLS. The banking giants have become part of CLSNet, the bilateral payment netting calculation service for over 120 currencies.

BNY Mellon and ING Agree to Join CLSNet Community

BNY Mellon, the world's largest custodian bank managing over $41.1 trillion in assets, and ING, the largest Dutch bank with over €951 billion in assets, are the latest participants to join the growing CLSNet community. Eight of the top top global banks are already members of the service.

"We are delighted that BNY Mellon and ING are joining CLSNet's growing community of users," Lisa Danino-Lewis, the Chief Growth Officer at CLS, commented. "In addition to banks, CLSNet is directly accessible to most market participants, making its benefits widely available to the FX industry."

CLSNet is a centralized platform that standardizes and streamlines post-trade processes, including same-day trades and non-deliverable forwards (NDFs). By netting offsetting payment obligations , the service helps reduce settlement risk and achieve greater operational efficiency across a range of currency transactions.

Jason Vitale, the Head of Global Markets Trading at BNY Mellon, said joining CLSNet "will enable us to provide clients with improvements in intraday liquidity and execution efficiency."

A month ago, CLS predicted that global financial markets might experience a significant change as CLS, a multi-currency settlement system for foreign exchange trades, was contemplating postponing settlement instructions for currency transactions.

Record Year for CLSNet

The platform has seen record growth this year in adoption and usage. The average daily notional value of net calculations has consistently exceeded $115 billion over the last 12 months. On 20 December, CLSNet reached a record daily netted notional amount of $445 billion.

"CLSNet provides the functionality to strengthen and standardize the post-trade processes across the global currency spectrum," said Robbert Zee, the FM Operations Lead at ING. He added that ING's participation "will be integral to our strategy to further improve operational efficiency and reduce risk."

By automating netting on a centralized platform, participants can achieve increased efficiency and risk reduction for currencies not currently settled through CLSSettlement, the company's settlement system.