Eris Exchange, a futures exchange offering interest rate swap futures with OTC flexibility cleared by CME Clearing, has announced May 18 as the launch date for its electronic trading platform. The platform is powered by Currenex part of State Street's eExchange suite of trading technology solutions.

Featuring a fully-anonymous central limit order book, request for quote (RFQ) and in-line credit controls, the Eris Exchange platform allows buy-side users and sales desks to trade standard maturity, plain vanilla, spot-starting swap futures with click-and-done assurance against streaming executable quotes from a dedicated group of liquidity providers. Eris Exchange employs trading protocols familiar to the OTC marketplace, with contract maturities any day out to 30 years, par swaps quoted in rate terms allowing up to a tenth of a basis point of precision and seasoned swaps quoted in NPV-based upfront payment terms.

"We are delighted to leverage Currenex's world-class technology and distribution to offer clients and sales desks direct access to the Eris Exchange Interest Rate Swap Futures contract," said Neal Brady, CEO of Eris Exchange. "Eris Exchange's open, anonymous market model provides buy-side institutions the transparency, competitive price execution, and immediate price reporting that is demanded by recent regulatory reforms."

"The changing regulatory landscape in the derivatives market represents an opportunity for new platforms that offer market participants significant benefits such as expanded access to liquidity and increased transparency," said Clifford Lewis, executive vice president and head of State Street's eExchange business. "State Street is focused on delivering electronic trade execution services that encourage innovation."

John Fay, Head of North America for Newedge said, "Having cleared more than $20 billion in notional value of Eris Exchange contracts, we are also first-movers in supporting the migration to the Eris Exchange platform, because it brings key benefits to our customers and provides clearing firms like us the ability to control centralized risk limits that result in trade certainty for all market participants."