After a two-year break, during which Tibco acquired Streambase, it’s good to see that they are continuing the excellent FX Trading and Technology Trends survey, that Streambase published between 2010-12 (see here for 2011 and 2012 surveys).
I haven’t yet seen this years report, but if it’s similar to previous survey’s then it will focus on buy-side and sell-side traders and their use of electronic FX platforms.
Key findings being:
- Share of FX participants trading electronically remains steady at 80%
- Regulation seen as providing opportunities for innovation and competitive differentiation
- Traders prefer executing on SDP to MDP
- Expectation that bilateral relationship pricing from liquidity providers enhances execution quality
- Fragmentation driving more firms are add additional liquidity providers via aggregation services
Top banks
- Barclay’s topped list of most popular SDP (42%)
- Deutsche (40%)
- Citi (38%)
Differences between Buy and Sell side in SDP preference
The chart below shows the marked difference between buy and sell side firms for the top three SDPs. Whilst buy-side firms preferences are pretty evenly divided between the three platforms, it’s interesting to see how Citi’s Velocity platform has such traction with the sellside traders, which must have helped Citi gain top place in this years EuroMoney FX ranking.
Buy and Sell side preferences for SDPs
Most used MDPs
Bloomberg was the most popular MDP for all respondents, followed by FXall then Reuters and Currenex as shown in the chart below. This same order also held true for Sell-Side firms. Whilst for buy-side firms Currenex was ranked 3rd place, with Reuters dropping to joint 5th place along with CME Group.
MDP Preferences by all respondents
The survey was completed by some 147 respondents actively engaged in FX trading, of which 63% were buy-side and 38% being sell-side.
