Russia: Rouble moves mainstream
Igor Souzdaltsev, president of ACI Russia and head of financial institutions at Investsberbank in Moscow, sent me an e-mail this week informing me of an historic trade done between a Russian and overseas bank. “The first deal took place on October 2. It’s the first case of automated rouble quoting by Russian bank on a foreign broking marketplace. We [have] made the Russian national currency 100% convertible today. The implementation of Investsberbank’s project Convertible Rouble took two years of hard work but it’s worth it,” he said.
The transaction occurred on LavaFX, the interbank platform that had a soft launch earlier this year and appears to be doing considerably better than certain other systems that came out all guns blazing.
“Last summer president Putin announced that the rouble would become convertible effective end July 2006. This was at least 6 months ahead of expectations if not more,” says David Ogg, head of LavaFX. “Since then LavaFX has been working to get streaming spot rouble with two-day settlement prices onto LavaFX from banks in Russia. Last Tuesday the first trade ever conducted between a non–Russian bank and a Russian bank on a streaming spot price on a platform outside of Russia took place with full settlement.”