Natallia Hunik sits down with Andrew Saks McLeod of Finance Feeds in London to discuss how FX liquidity access has changed for the retail FX aggregators.
Topics discussed included:
1. Why retail FX aggregators lost access to Tier 1 Prime Brokers?
2. How retail FX brokers source liquidity nowadays?
3. How much flow on average do retail FX brokers STP to the market?
4. What is the outlook for the future?
As we are turning the corner of 10 years post 2008 financial crisis, I would like to reflect on my past 10 years in FX and how it has changed.
FX Prime Brokerage and FX Prime of Prime scenes have undergone dramatic changes.
Prime of Prime in FX, has undergone a lot of changes in the past few years, yet it remains one of the most highly demanded services in today’s marketplace. Prime of Prime’s role is to extend interbank market access to clients who do not have access to credit. To put it another way, it helps create direct market access for those clients who do not meet the stringent collateral and credit criteria that’s needed in order for them to establish their own, direct, prime broker relationship with a bank. The main value that a real Prime of Prime delivers is non-latent access to institutional trading, in a secure and regulated environment.
The quality of your STP trade execution is dependent on a number of important factors including speed/latency, accuracy, rejection ratios and cost. I would like to take this opportunity to review some of these in greater detail.
In my opinion, last year’s SNB decision to remove the 1.20 floor on EURCHF acted as a catalyst, reshaping how we now view and approach the FX industry. As we observed throughout 2015, the SNB move radically altered FX technology and liquidity paradigms and the aftershocks of this “seismic” shift are still being felt today.
