The UK Financial Services Authority (FSA) has granted UBS Investment Bank permission to launch a dark multilateral trading facility (MTF), UBS MTF, for crossing securities in Europe.
The UBS MTF allows mid-point matching based on the price of the primary market. It will be accessible to all eligible market participants and is intended to be complementary to UBS’ existing internal crossing service for client orders, UBS PIN.
UBS said that the new platform will use a central counterparty clearing model to mitigate clients’ counterparty risks and reduce settlement costs.
Executions will be reported post-trade in real time to trade reporting platform Markit BOAT.
UBS MTF CEO Robert Barnes said that the company is pleased to have the FSA’s approval to proceed.
“Throughout the application process, we emphasized client choice, innovation, fair access, and efficiency, the core ideologies that inspired the business model of UBS MTF. This is a major step forward in our goal towards going live in the fourth quarter,” Barnes said.