Raphaels Bank to go live on ESN in November

Implementation started at the beginning of September, with testing due to start in coming weeks. Raphaels will use the full breadth of Wallstreet ESN's foreign exchange and money-market functionality to grow its commercial and corporate FX services business. The bank will benefit from increased control over trading operations, through the provision of FX sales and trading tools, electronic trading, position management, back office, Swift interface and accounting, the vendor said.

The bank's existing technology lacked some of the functional coverage that it now wishes to provide to clients, including an e-trading capability and a broader range of payment services, said a vendor official. The bank has to date been using in-house developed applications. The new technology will provide greater efficiencies to the bank by automating a number of processes.

Raphaels is the fifth bank to sign up to Wallstreet ESN, following successful signings with other regional banks looking to grow FX businesses. These include Region's Bank, Huntington National Bank, a further US bank and a bank in South America (FX Week, September 5, 2009 and April 19). For Raphaels, the Wallstreet ESN system will be hosted in Wallstreet's European data centre in the UK, which came online this month with remote disaster recovery from another Wallstreet data centre in Germany.

Wallstreet ESN is an outsourced processing hub for financial institutions, which eliminates the need for large investments in IT infrastructure, upfront software licence fees and ongoing operating costs. Wallstreet ESN has processing capacity for its members with associated economies of scale, introducing a transaction-based model for processing FX, cash and over-the-counter derivatives.