Bank-backed currency trading portal Atriax has signed up seven new member banks and recruited Japan's Toshiba to its corporate and institutional advisory board.
The new members are Banca di Roma, Commerzbank, DG Bank, Erste Bank, Hypo Vereinsbank, Israel Discount Bank of New York and Lloyds TSB. Atriax has been established as a joint venture between Citibank, Chase Manhattan, Deutsche Bank and Reuters with the aim of providing large corporate currency traders with a one-stop shop for price discovery and execution. With the new recruits onboard, Atriax now numbers 58 banking members representing 62% of the total foreign exchange market volume transacted by the top 100 banks in the Euromoney May 2000 survey.
In a seperate development, Toshiba Corporation has agreed to join the Atriax advisory board of twenty-five corporate and institutional members. Toshiba’s participation has been welcomed by Atriax for the insight it will bring to the Japanese market.
The service has also expanded its geographical reach, providing access to market participants from Ecuador, Germany, Honduras, Indonesia, Panama, Peru, Romania, South Africa, Thailand and Turkey. Atriax is now authorised to operate in a total of forty-two countries worldwide.
A number of detail changes to the Web site have also been introduced, including a foreign exchange forecast grid and a 'Sentiment Index' which will synthesise the divergence of forecasts from the relevant forward rates into a single measure for each currency pair. Data coverage has also been expanded, including twenty-four new cross rate displays and the ability to view multiple spot rates.
To aid the systems integration process for banking members, Atriax has released an API enabling auto-dealing integration into the Atriax dealing engine. The API has a simple implementation for integration over the Internet using http and https, or a much more robust implementation using the Atriax controlled extranet and a Java/JMS implementation of the API.