It’s not been a good week for State Street. As well as a fall in revenues (see State Street reports fall in trading revenue), the Boston-based bank is being sued by the State of California, which is alleging that State Street overcharged two of its high-profile pension funds on securities-related FX transactions. Several sources contacted me asking what I thought about ‘the biggest story to hit FX since, well, the last one’.
One of them, Integral’s Matthias Beckmann, says: “This came to light because of whistleblowers. We take this as validation that there is a strong need for TrueFX and its free historical and streaming real-time data to increase transparency and the safety of FX market participants.”
Beckmann may be wearing his PR hat, but he does have a point. And this incident goes a long way to support some of my recent ranting about how everyone in FX should be concerned about the impact of acts that portray the industry in a bad light. However, I disagree with the claim that the allegations over CalPERS and CalSTERS, as the funds are known, are the biggest story in FX for some time.