Cobalt secures investment from Standard Chartered

By Sunniva Kolostyak

Standard Chartered has signed as a client on Cobalt, a foreign exchange post-trade infrastructure provider, joining Citi as a banking investor in the platform.

Cobalt has created a single version of a trade and checking credit in real time which enables the FinTech to cut operational costs and reduce credit, settlement and operational risk.

By re-engineering post-trade FX workflows, the solution can support all market participants, including banks, buy-side, market makers and retail brokers.

Gareth James, Macro COO from Standard Chartered, explained: “We see Cobalt as being a core part of our FX operating platform, enabling Standard Chartered to reduce risk and costs by automating manual processes across the bank and therefore improving services to our clients. This investment shows our confidence in the platform and we look forward to continuing to grow our relationship with Cobalt.”

Cobalt aims to address the current over-allocation of credit in the market which represents significant systemic risk. Its solution allows for dynamic credit allocation across clients and counterparties to allow full compliance with the FX Global Code.

The platform enables full automation of the trade lifecycle without the need for additional downstream reconciliation.

Cobalt’s technology has multiple lenses and can service interbank, prime, buy-side and bank-to-client relationships. With information security standards on par with a tier 1 bank, Cobalt allows banks to brand the technology to use for their own clients.

Darren Coote, CEO at Cobalt: “The past few months have been a tumultuous time for the financial markets with market participants realising quickly that their current infrastructures were not fit for the new normal. During this period Cobalt’s solutions have continued to allow our network to operate at ease as well as reducing their all-important operating costs.”

“We welcome Standard Chartered as our latest client investor and look forward to continuing to work with them in this new capacity, to both improve our services and extend our offering, with a particular focus on the emerging markets.”