Fortis Bank Global Clearing (FBGC) is beefing up its infrastructure in anticipation of a rise in foreign exchange volumes, said an official at the bank in London.

The bank is automating its foreign exchange risk management, clearing and settlement processes using technology from New York-based vendor TwoFour.

The project is currently in a configuration stage, to align TwoFour’s software with Fortis’s existing systems. A period of testing is expected to take place this month and TwoFour said the bank has a view to go live at the end of June or in early July.

The TwoFour system can process 3,900 cash flows per second. Andrew Gibson, FBGC’s London-based sales manager for foreign exchange products, said this will allow the bank to “easily support anticipated volumes.”

Les Gosling, London-based head of sales and marketing at TwoFour, said the implementation process will be aided by the fact that Fortis is also using TwoFour technology for its treasury cash management business. “We’ve been able to leverage the two projects because we only had to prove once that we could deploy the system into their technical environment,” Gosling said.

“The solution is implemented as a client server architecture with a centralised system, which is then delivered to end users’ PCs via their own network. It is all deployed on their own technology,” he told FX Week.

The contract to implement the system was signed in March this year. Gosling said this could have happened earlier but discussions were “impacted when Fortis went through significant structural change”. In September last year the governments of Belgium, Luxemburg and the Netherlands invested €11.2 billion in Fortis to help keep it afloat. This gave each government a 49% stake in the bank in their respective countries.