Last September, MarkitSERV, IHS Markit’s post-trade processing business, launched an ambitious cloud-based platform called TradeServ, first going live with foreign exchange (FX) for non-deliverable forwards (NDFs). The new TradeServ platform has processed about 1.4 million NDF trades for clearing and 34 financial institutions are active on the platform for FX, according to a spokesperson.

The plan was to launch credit on TradeServ in the first half of 2019, but that rollout has been delayed. MarkitSERV is not ready to announce a new launch date at this point, but it will not happen this year.

“The re-platforming of our trade confirmation and processing service for credit derivatives is one of the largest and most complex upgrades ever offered to the market,” according to a spokesperson. “A large group of dealers, asset managers and infrastructure players, including clearinghouses, are currently conducting testing to validate the interaction between participants and other credit market systems. The time and rigor we are putting into testing will help ensure that the launch is as seamless and as transformative as we know it can be.”

• READ MORE: TradeServ is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering that will house other entrenched platforms, including MarkitWire, Markit Trade Manager (MTM) and DSMatch. For an inside look into how TradeServ was created, click here.

The credit rollout has proven to be more complex, in that it requires a massive amount of coordination among market participants. MarkitSERV has been in testing for almost a year with about 60 clients, including banks, asset managers, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), central counterparties in three regions and compression services.

Because these firms need to all go live at the same time—the proverbial “big-bang approach” to product development, as opposed to an incremental rollout—MarkitSERV is not rushing the process.

“We’re moving off of a mainframe and that’s just the reality—it’s not really possible to do a lot of parallel stuff; it’s kind of an all-or-none in terms of getting it done functionally,” Brad Levy, CEO of MarkitSERV, tells WatersTechnology. “And then it’s not really feasible to run a parallel prod—it’s either everything is in the mainframe or nothing. So that’s where we are in terms of the nature of this.”

At the same time, as a broader trend, the market for credit derivatives has slowed down as there is a fair amount of uncertainty stemming from Brexit, the 2020 US presidential election, questions about whether Libor will remain as a benchmark past 2021, and there being a new credit-default swap (CDS) protocol for Germany.

Additionally, adding to the complexity of the credit launch is the fact that TradeServ will connect to the DTCC’s new Trade Information Warehouse (TIW), which is being built using distributed-ledger technology and requires them decommissioning their own mainframe. Phase 1 of the TIW is scheduled to go live later this year.