City Networks announced today their intention to invest in Message Automation, the London-based derivatives processing specialist. The two companies have agreed terms for City Networks to acquire a significant minority stake in Message Automation. At the same time, both companies have signed a partnership agreement that enables City Networks to add extensive derivatives processing to their business solutions.
Under this new partnership agreement, City Networks will be able to offer their 500+ global customers Message Automation’s matching and reconciliation technology, which is based on Financial products Markup Language (FpML), the industry standard protocol for OTC derivatives products.
“Given the continued growth in the use of OTC derivatives and the fact that there is still a high level of manual processing involved”, explains Richard Hill, City Networks’ ceo, “most financial firms experience high error rates and remain exposed to significant risks and losses. Automating these complex trades is not easy and whilst we already had some capability in this area, we wanted to provide our customers with deeper functionality that supported all derivatives processing regardless of asset class. We are confident that with Message Automation’s expertise in this area, our Proactive process management software will be positioned at the forefront of derivatives processing.”
Commenting on the alliance, Hugh Daly, ceo of Message Automation said, “Our proven capabilities in the derivatives market provide a natural fit with City Networks’ established and global customer base. The investment will allow us to grow our business to meet the demand we are encountering in the market. For many organizations the OTC Derivatives post trade problem is far from being fixed, and this is a powerful alliance which will go a long way to resolving this problem.”
