Case Study — Exchange Clearing & Back Office

Real-Time Clearing & Back Office for TFX

Managing six exchange connection sessions, FIX clearing adapters and resilient end-of-day processing to clear the Tokyo Financial Exchange's FX and exchange-traded CFD markets — every trading day.

Executive Summary

The Tokyo Financial Exchange (TFX) lists exchange-traded FX (Click 365) and Contract-for-Difference futures on major global equity indices. Both during the trading day in real time, and at the end of every trading day, Touch-Fire performs the full clearing and back-office cycle for these markets — through FIX clearing adapters and exchange data file transfer.

Over many years Touch-Fire has worked closely with TFX to help the exchange support overseas participants — including developing the exchange's first real-time position-adjustment API for customers accustomed to FIFO position management. Because connecting to TFX directly is complex, multiple vendors (CQG, InterTrade, Bloomberg, MetaTrader 5 and other FIX systems) now route through the Touch-Fire platform, which transparently handles the exchange's custom behaviour on their behalf.

Six Sessions, One Simplified Interface

TFX interacts with brokers across six distinct connection sessions. Touch-Fire manages all of them, presenting participants with a single coherent platform rather than six independent integrations.

Session	Purpose
Order	Order flow, plus TradeBust, Cancel-on-Disconnect, Kill Switch, hard limits and Good-for-Week orders.
Clearing	Scheduled clearing registrations — accounts, deposits/withdrawals, commissions, advances, open/close settlement.
Operation	Notification timing messages (trading open, clearing closed, and similar lifecycle events).
Information	Reference and status information published by the exchange.
DMA MM Rate	Designated market-maker rate / quoting session.
FTP	File-based exchange data — settlement prices, margins, swap points, accounts and calendars.

The Clearing & Back-Office Flows

Eight clearing functions are handled over the dedicated FIX Clearing session, each mapped to the corresponding TFX message:

Account Registration — new customer accounts registered with the exchange (which clears at the customer-account level), with mapping, status and order-capacity configuration.
Deposit & Withdrawal Registration — client cash movements entered through the Touch-Fire front-end and registered with TFX.
Commission Registration — calculated daily, submitted monthly on the last trading day, with adjustment support.
Advance Registration (Tatekaikin) — covering client margin shortfalls on the exchange side, with same-day recovery once the client funds their account.
Open/Close Settlement — Touch-Fire applies FIFO to every account automatically and relays offset pairs to TFX on a 60-second repeating schedule.
Open/Close Cancel & Extra Contract — same-day corrections and prior-day position adjustments.

The system downloads and processes exchange data from the TFX FTP site through more than seventy configured jobs, selecting the relevant files from the 24 the exchange publishes:

Settlement prices (separate FX and CFD files) used to mark every account position to market.
Margin file driving the per-product initial margin (applied weekly, in line with the exchange's own update cadence).
Swap points, account and calendar data feeding statements and the daily cycle.

Beyond standard order flow, the Order session carries post-trade and risk controls:

Kill Switch and Hard Limits — letting brokers disable client trading and set position limits, enforced by the exchange's risk system for directly-connected clients such as market makers.
SQ & "TFX Reset" processing — Special Quotation expiry on the final trading day, and automatic offset of expiring CFD positions; the back office processes these exceptional execution reports and closes out the affected positions.
Exceptional execution flags — liquidation, member-level and exchange-level adjustments are recognised and routed to the correct booking treatment.

After trade and exchange data are imported, the system runs the full settlement calculation set — realised and unrealised P/L, commission, tax, swap, margin, net liquidity and available cash — and produces daily and monthly statements in both Japanese and English, viewable in the web application or written to file.

Completed transaction data and reports are then archived into smaller monthly databases for long-term, fast historical lookup.

Engineered for Resilience

A clearing system cannot lose a fill. The end-to-end pipeline is built so that every stage has a defined failover, with no evident single point of failure from a software perspective.

FIX Drop Copy → Hub → Order File → File Tracker → DB → Batch / Reports

The FIX engine guarantees in-sequence, gap-free message delivery, and the drop-copy adapter does not advance until each message is durably written. Sequence files and order files are mirrored to a secondary server, the database runs as a cluster, and every batch job is written to be idempotent — safe to re-run repeatedly. Position bookings can be rebuilt from source to correct FIFO processing in the event of missing data, and a failed fill with an unrecognised account or instrument is parked in a FailedFill table for clean reprocessing once configuration is corrected.

Results & Impact

Real-time and end-of-day clearing for TFX FX and CFD markets, run reliably every trading day across a complex, daylight-savings-aware schedule.

CQG, InterTrade, Bloomberg, MetaTrader 5 and other FIX systems reach TFX through Touch-Fire, which absorbs the exchange's custom order types and clearing complexity on their behalf.

Long-standing collaboration with the exchange — including its first real-time position-adjustment API — has helped overseas participants connect to the Japanese market.

Related Capabilities

The high-throughput TFX gateway product behind our market-maker and DMA connectivity.

Connecting CQG, InterTrade, Bloomberg and MetaTrader 5 into Japanese markets through one gateway.

End-to-end mid- and back-office, clearing and post-trade reporting.

Need Exchange-Grade Clearing?

Touch-Fire runs live, regulated clearing and back-office operations for Japanese exchange markets. Talk to us about clearing, settlement and post-trade for your venue or brokerage.

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