After detailed analysis, Aphelion AB was chosen among many other competitors, as a supplier of comprehensive FX trading solution – Quasar. Quasar includes eFX, a central algorithmic trading system. It helps to aggregate liquidity from world largest banks and to trade on pooled liquidity. Open currency positions can be easily managed, as a result of implementation of various automated hedging strategies. The eFX system is used to configure and manage FX rates that are sent to Alior Bank’s FX platforms. Alior Trader, Autodealing and Kantor Walutowy are focused on retail clients. However, Quasar Trader Portal is a single bank portal dedicated to most sophisticated corporate clients. Quasar Trader Portal is a product fully developed by Aphelion. Thanks to the fact that the Quasar eFX server is hosted in London, it provides ultralow latency of trade execution and excellent access to top banks liquidity. Solutions that are implemented by Alior Bank are unique for the polish market and they will help to achieve advantage in e-trading on the local market. Broad functionality of Alior Bank’s services gives opportunity to become a market maker for other banks and multi bank portals.

“The eFX system makes the market transparent for our platforms’ users and gives them opportunity to trade at the best price”, says Tomasz Wróblewski, head of financial risk management at Alior.

Peter Jorgne, CEO, Aphelion, said: “We are delighted to have been selected by Alior and welcome them to our trading platform and interbank network”.

Alior Bank is already live with eFX for trading and publishing prices to its existing trading portals (Autodealing and Kantor Walutowy). The solution for corporate clients will be launched in October.

About Alior Bank
In the world of banking Alior Bank is still a fresh brand. Conceived by Carlo Tassara Group in 2007, the brand was formally launched across Poland in October 2008 and was the largest startup in European banking history. At the moment Alior Bank has over 1,27 million clients, for whom it offers unique products in the Polish markets. Alior Bank is a national and universal bank, servicing all market segments.The bank’s offering is targeted at Customers, who are expecting a high quality of services, advice, and higher yields on their products. The bank makes available products and services which were only offered to date to selected, the most affluent Customers, as well as products which have not been available to date on the market.

“Our objective is to provide a high standard of customer service, for cooperative banks and corporate clients, as well as institutionals in the highly competitive foreign exchange environment. Aphelion exactly meets our requirements and offers our customers a tailormade fx solution with a wide range of functionality and speed” says Roland Weiß, Head of Corporate Sales FX at DZ BANK.

Quasar eFX includes an FX pricing and rate engine, FX rule-based decision and autotrading system, White-labelling single bank portal, FX order management and FX Liquidity management including aggregation, autohedge and algorithmic execution.

“Trading generally is a highly competitive environment and foreign exchange specifically even more so. We can see that in order to be successful we need to automate the trading processes where possible and our objective is to service our customers better with faster responses to their RFQs and even more competitive prices” Says Mikko Räsänen, Head of Foreign Exchange and Money Markets at Pohjola.

“Partnering with Aphelion and implementing Quasar will open up new possibilities to the bank/for Pohjola and enables us to compete with the top Nordic banks. We will start by servicing our clients on the multibank portals FXall and 360T but we are looking to add more multibank portals as well as our own single bank portal.” Says Jarmo Koukonen, Head of FX and MM, Sales and Trading at Pohjola.

“We are very pleased to have been selected by Pohjola and looking forward to working with them in providing their new FX environment,” said Peter Jörgne, CEO at Aphelion.

For further informationEnquires should be made to Peter Jörgne +46–734-399040 (Aphelion) or Jarmo Koukonen +358–10-2524296 (Pohjola)

See press release in full »

This will create a new delivery channel for and decrease time-to-market for our customers.

Aphelion now joins the already large group of over 60 leading FX providers including 360T, Citi, Currenex, FXall and Hotspot FX, on the BT’s secure networked financial community.

See press release in full »

“The results of the implementation have exceeded our, already, quite ambitious expectations,” says Madeleine Persson, Head of FX/FI Business Enabling.
At Swedbank we have an expansive strategy, especially within FX and with Quasar´s low-latency platform we have been able to increase autopricing to more currency pairs and tenors and to larger amounts. We are currently autoquoting more than 100 currency pairs. Our eFX flows are now several multiples higher than six months ago. We find the Quasar platform to be exceptionally versatile and configurable.

Quasar Auto Trader offers significant advancements in automatic real-time pricing and order handling. The result is increased performance with more effective handling of higher volumes. Extensive modeling of pricing and advanced autotrading rules reduces risk and improve profits.

Quasar architecture supports unlimited modularity with connectivity to any channel for efficient straight-through processing. Quasar’s distributed trading architecture is scalable for linear growth.

Current
Multibank connectivity: FXall, Currenex, RTFX, 360T and Bloomberg
Liquidity provider connectivity: Deutsche Bank, ICAP / EBS, Currenex and Goldman Sachs

Mr. Diasparra brings with him an extensive background in business development and management of companies ranging from technology startups to CIO / CTO positions for global firms including Fidelity Investments, ING Barings and ABN AMRO. He has a proven track record of managing the development and deployment of leading edge technologies within the financial services sector.

“I’m very excited to join Aphelion as I have known and worked with their founders over the course of the past decade. Their expertise in FX trading is exceptional. It gives me great pride to join their team and bring the most powerful FX autotrading software into the North American market.“
– says Mr. Diasparra

“We are delighted to have Frank join our team in this very key role as we launch in North America.” — says Peter Jörgne, the CEO of Aphelion. “Naturally North America is a key market for us and it’s the natural step to take when we establish ourselves outside Europe.”

Traders handle their own portal in the same way as other external channels. Chosen clients can be connected to yourown white-label portal.