Bear Stearns Forex, the foreign exchange trading subsidiary of Bear Stearns, and Charles River Development announced a new partnership through which Bear Stearns became the first FX counterparty to offer investment managers live executable FX markets directly through an order management system via the Financial Information eXchange (FIX) protocol.

“Most of the FX participants elect to use FXall and Currenex right now, so there aren’t a lot doing foreign exchange via FIX,” said Larry Tabb, president of the Tabb Group. “I think the trend is going to be toward creating more two-sided FX markets, and that is going to push the standard use of protocols.”

The advantage for firms who use the Charles River Investment Management System and have a relationship with Bear Stearns Forex is that the interface provides a simple integration between the two. The interface, which Charles River designed to streamline workflow, improve order spreads and increase compliance capabilities, will be available in version 8 of the Charles River IMS. For Bear Stearns Forex, clients using the system will be able to electronically route FX spot, swap and currency forward orders to Bear Stearns for immediate execution. The link supports post-trade FIX allocation messages, as well as MT304 SWIFT messages.

“We are seeing investment managers trading across borders more frequently than in the past, and generally paying closer attention to the impact of FX and their overall investment management performance,” said Michael Hayes, director, strategic alliances at Charles River, in explaining the vendor’s greater push into the FX space.

The Charles River IMS is a comprehensive front-to-middle-office software suite for all security types that includes Charles River Manager for portfolio management and modeling; Charles River Trader for order management and electronic trading; Charles River Compliance for real-time pre-trade and end of day compliance; Charles River Settlements for centralized post-trade processing; and real-time FIX trading via the Charles River Network.

Charles River combined Microsoft .NET, Web Services, Java and industry standard technologies to create the Charles River IMS’s N-Tier service-oriented architecture, and to ensure that the Charles River IMS would be open, flexible, scalable and easy to use. Message-based APIs and exposed Web services facilitate rapid systems integration.