A process by which number of the world’s largest banks manage settlement of foreign exchange amongst themselves (and their customers and other third-parties) is known as continuous Linked Settlement. CLS Group Holdings AG and its subsidiary companies manage this process and it include a settlement bank regulated by the Federal Reserve Board of New York. In 1997 the formation of Group takes place and since 2002 the settlement system has been operational. As of February 2009 there had been a participation of 73 shareholders and 62 settlement members as well as 4,576 Third Party participants (411 banks, corporate and non-bank financial institutions and 4,165 investment funds) in the system.
Since its operations were initiated, between major banks CLS has rapidly become the market-standard for foreign exchange settlement, and as of 17 September 2008, 1,554,166 instructions a day in 17 currencies were settled by it and that represents some 95% of global foreign exchange trading and with a gross value of US$8.6 trillion or about 1,300 U.S. dollars on that day for every person on the Earth. This new record had broken the previous record of about US$ 1,148,000 million, and for the first time in history the volume of payment instructions settled in one day has exceeded 1.5 million.
