FastFin creates FXswapX, Advanced yet Non-disruptive FX Swap Matching for Banks

Initiative bridges the growing gap between banks with internal swaps order books and traditional STIRT and FX trading desks

New York, March 18, 2025  FastFin Labs, Inc., the capital markets innovation lab and incubator led by Richard Leader - a co-founder of FX HedgePool - and Simon Wilson-Taylor - founder of State Street’s GlobalLink and FXConnect, founder of Molten Markets, and co-founder of LoopFX - has built FXswapX, an FX swaps matching platform designed specifically for banks to exchange risk with each other, with minimal market impact or information leakage.

The key issues that this new platform addresses are:

• Creation of trusted reference rates computed from bank data, yet without any bank being required to disclose their proprietary data
• A trading process that recognizes and fully supports the trading needs of voice traders on  STIRT / FX desks while also enabling API connections from those banks who have created internal electronic order books for FX swaps
• A matching process that prioritizes large transactions – ideally suited for the FX swaps market while also making it very difficult to ‘game’ the process, or extract information

As a leading creator of trading applications and workflow automation solutions for banks, vendors, venues, and buy-side firms, FastFin Labs does not normally own and operate its own creations. Therefore, FastFin expects to partner with a new or existing industry consortium to bring FXswapX to market quickly and globally, with the full regulatory and operational support of the partner.  Industry working groups will also provide oversight and direction to FXswapX.

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A standout innovation of FXswapX is its implementation of secure multi-party computation (MPC) and homomorphic encryption (HE) techniques.  This cutting-edge approach allows FXswapX to derive trusted market insights from banks’ encrypted price data streams without ever exposing or decrypting the underlying information, ensuring both security and confidentiality, and eliminating any possible opportunity for collusion in data generation.  Dr. Andrei Lapets, cryptography advisor to FXswapX and co-founder of MPC partner firm Choose K said: “Unfortunately there has been a history of manipulation and collusion in benchmarks used for trading across the capital markets, resulting in significant fines. The solution pioneered by my team ensures that each bank’s data remains fully encrypted at all times, even while we perform complex computations to produce trusted benchmarks that are ideally suited for trading purposes”.

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Richard Leader said: “FXswapX was built using FastFin’s proven Innovation Kickstarter methodology for rapidly prototyping and productionizing fully-functional trading applications – the very same process that we use for our capital markets clients and previous incubations such as FX HedgePool. We will continue to refine the solution based on participant feedback, but we are ready to demonstrate the product today and are on target for a full launch later this year.”.

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Simon Wilson-Taylor added: “We have approached the FX swaps market through a different lens than many other projects. We are extremely aware that this is a market that does not necessarily need a “disruptive” solution, so what we have built supports the transition that is occurring towards the need for a fully electronic inter-dealer market whilst operating in familiar ways for the traditional manual traders”.