[ T H O U G H T
business sustainable and resilient
to changes in market structure.
Specifically, we are growing and
diversifying the client base, as
well as continually examining and
questioning how we operate the
platform in order to constantly
improve the trading experience for
market participants.
We have changed some of the
historical practices at Euronext FX,
and there are more to come. For
example, we no longer distribute
real-time information about indi-
vidual executed trades because we
determined, in consultation with
participants on our platform, that
we were inadvertently contributing
to too much information leakage,
which was detrimental to our trad-
ing ecosystem.
How is the recent launch of your
Singapore matching engine an im-
portant development for Euronext
FX?
Our presence in Asia is not as
strong as it is in the US and in
Europe, notwithstanding that we
have an active matching engine in
Tokyo. Our view is that the steps
that the Monetary Authority of
Singapore is taking to build an
electronic FX infrastructure for
Asia, based out of Singapore, will
be very successful.
Several bank and non-bank
liquidity providers are setting up
their pricing engines in Singa-
pore. We were the first ECN to
announce a future launch and
were the first to go-live. While we
benefit from being part of a large,
stable and mature organisation, we
also have the ability to be nimble
and do things that might take
longer for other organisations. We
had announced in March that the
matching engine would go live in
Q4 of this year and we are pleased
that we, along with our clients,
were able to go live with the first
L E A D E R S H I P
|
E U R O N E X T ]
“We were the first ECN to announce a
future launch of a matching engine in
Singapore and were the first to go-live.”
trade in early September.
What are the key strengths of the
FastMatch technology?
It always starts with speed and
throughput - there's a reason that
the technology is called Fast-
Match. In addition to speed and
throughput, we have a unique of-
fering when it comes to function-
ality and order types. We operate
a highly efficient, experienced and
cohesive development team for the
simple reason that we want to be
agile, have flexibility to re-pri-
oritise quickly, and continuously
release new functionality.
It is quite encouraging to see
that when volatility picks up, our
relative performance does as well.
In August, the market was much
more volatile than it has been
the rest of the year, we had our
3rd best month ever in terms of
volume, and we gained share vs
all of our peers who report Spot
FX volumes. This is in large part
due to the speed advantage of our
platform – although many of the
product, sales, liquidity manage-
ment and development initiatives
we’ve been pursuing have surely
contributed as well.
We pride ourselves on hav-
ing unique functionality that is
valuable to the marketplace. For
instance, we have functionality
called Leak, Sweep, Protection
(LSP), which allows liquidity
providers to have Euronext FX
implement last-look on their
behalf. This is extremely power-
ful because it massively reduces
information leakage for price
takers. One of the concerns about
the traditional use of last look is
that it allows liquidity providers
to see orders from price takers,
reject those orders, and then ben-
efit from information embedded
in seeing (but not filling) those
orders. With our LSP functionality,
the liquidity providers never see
the orders that are rejected and
thus the price taker is protected
from information leakage.
How would you say Euronext FX
differentiates itself from other
players in the FX space?
We are focused on growing the
Euronext FX business, which can
be challenging in a low volatility
environment that has seen the size
of the electronic Spot FX market
shrink in 2019. Our growth over
time will come from a variety of
sources: (1) continuing to grow
our client footprint, (2) geograph-
ic expansion – as exemplified by
our recent launch in Singapore,
(3) product expansion as we add
derivatives products to our current
offering, which is Spot only today,
and (4) market data, with the FX
Tape being the primary example.
In order for us to achieve our
goals we need to have a great team
and be sufficiently staffed. In addi-
tion to the organisational changes
mentioned earlier, we have also so-
lidified the team with several key
new hires. This summer we added
five members to the team across
New York, London and Singapore.
Our ability to attract talent from
tier 1 global banks and from our
competitors reinforces for us that
we are on the right path and have
exciting times ahead.
Issue 61 // TheTradeNews.com // 47