Straight through processing for corporate foreign exchange trading Lessons learned from a Web Service based implementation

For multinational companies, buying and selling products worldwide is part of their every day business. Thus they have to deal with receivables and payables denominated in foreign currencies, which have to be hedged against foreign currency risk using derivative foreign exchange contracts. In the past this task has strongly relied on voice based broking. However, with Internet technology, online marketplaces for trading foreign exchange emerged offering access to the liquidity of a global market. Still companies are reluctant when deciding about the deployment of this new trading channel, knowing that it will only become valuable when seamlessly integrated into the corporate´s foreign exchange trading process. In this work we present a Web service based straight through processing implementation and evaluate the users´ acceptance of the integrated online marketplace.