FXall appoints CTO in lead up to launch

Lemonik has been hired from Citigroup subsidiary CrossMar in New York where he was vice president, product development & chief technologist.

FXall is a bank-backed initiative to develop a multi-bank price discovery and trading channel for large corporate currency dealers over the internet. It is competing with rival bank-backed initiative Atriax, to be the first to launch against established third party portals such as Currenex.

Atriax says it is in the middle of a testing process that will see it launch by the end of Q2. FXall had announced it would launch in Q1, but with Lemonik’s appointment and the roll-out of Cognotec’s FXall Connect – the software that will connect banks to the FXall trading portal – that began in February, it is likely that FXall also plans to launch before June.

The founding equity partners behind FXall are Bank of America, Credit Suisse First Boston, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter and UBS Warburg. Since then, seven more banks have come on board as equity partners, although J.P. Morgan, now known as JPMorgan after the Chase merger, has defected to the Atriax consortium.

FXall claims that with its equity partners and other participating member banks it has access to over 40% of global liquidity in FX trading.