CLS Sees March Bounce in Activity

In what is becoming a pattern for the FX settlement service provider, CLS saw a healthy bounce in activity to end the first quarter of the year, making it the fifth successive year in which it has hit a new peak in March.

Overall the settlement service handled $2.111 trillion per day in March, up 4.2% from February, but actually down slightly, by 0.6% on March 2023, which was the busiest month of that year. This is the fourth busiest month for CLS since it started publishing data, beaten only be March 2020, March 2022 and, as noted, March 2023.

The growth was driven by FX swaps, which recorded a new, albeit very slight, higher water mark at $1.452 trillion. This beats the previous peak, in March 2022 by less than $10 billion and is up 4.7% from February.

Away from swaps, the spot data from CLS diverges slightly that from those platforms to report volumes earlier in the month – at $487 billion it is up 6.1% from February, but down 5.6% year-on-year. Broadly speaking, with the exception of EBS and Cboe FX, spot volumes across the platforms were up or flat from March 2023.

Outright forward volumes at CLS have continued their reversal from the peaks seen in the second half of 2023. In March average daily volume on CLS was $172 billion, down 4.4% from February, as well as from the low-$200 billion average seen in H2 last year, but still up a healthy 10.3% year-on-year.