BofA Joins CLS’s CCS Service

Bank of America has gone live on CLS’s Cross Currency Swaps service, as the FX industry continues efforts to reduce settlement risk in currency markets.

Cross currency swaps involve large initial and final principal exchanges, creating significant settlement risk exposure. In addition, settling these trades on a gross bilateral basis leads to operational inefficiencies and liquidity constraints. CLS’s CCS service mitigates these risks by settling payment instructions on the CCS principal exchanges through a payment-versus-payment (PvP) settlement mechanism, designed to ensure both sides of the swap settle simultaneously, thereby eliminating counterparty failure risk on these payments.

The CCS service can be used in conjunction with Osttra MarkitWire’s post-trade processing platform to integrate CCS flows into the main CLS Settlement service. CLS says participants can benefit from multilateral netting for their FX transactions, optimising liquidity and significantly reducing daily funding requirements. It adds that the average daily settled value of CCS submitted to CLS Settlement increasing by 87% in 2025, but does not provide a notional value. 

“With FX trading volumes at record levels and the average daily settled value continuing to grow, mitigating settlement risk has never been more important,” observes Lisa Danino-Lewis, chief growth officer at CLS. “The continued expansion of our CCS service, alongside Bank of America’s go-live, demonstrates meaningful progress in reducing risk across the FX market.”

Carlos Fernandez-Aller, co-head of global FICC macro at Bank of America, adds, “In an environment of heightened market volatility and increasing intraday liquidity demands, reducing unsecured settlement risk is a priority. This milestone demonstrates our commitment to reducing counterparty risk on cross currency swap initial and final principal exchanges while delivering operational and liquidity efficiencies that will support the continued growth of our FX business.”