Exclusive: All new prime brokerage opens in Cyprus – AMB Prime goes live

Cyprus. Home to over 180 retail FX brokerages.

An international focal point for the entire retail FX industry. Until now. Cyprus is evolving, and its FX industry structure is evolving with it.

Yes indeed, Cyprus, with its MiFID compliant regulatory framework that allows trans-European business activity, good quality business environment and highly skilled FX industry talent base has for some years been developing and fine tuning itself to become recognized as the destination for retail FX.

The entire global FX business now looks toward Cyprus and many essential services that support the FX business have now moved their operations to Cyprus, making the island a self-sufficient home to the entire electronic ecosystem, from platform providers – MetaQuotes and Spotware Systems are both based in Cyprus – to liquidity bridge providers – PrimeXM, one of the world’s three market-dominating liquidity bridge and MT4 integration firms is based in Cyprus, another being oneZero, which has recently established presence in Cyprus, to commercial lawyers dedicated to FX, and London’s institutional prime brokerages have their eye on the Eastern Mediterranean island all the time.

But what if Cyprus had its very own prime brokerage?

As of today, FinanceFeeds can exclusively report that AMB Prime has established its operations in Limassol, headed by CEO Gabriel Styllas, a longstanding FX industry senior figure, and one of the most familiar faces in this region for institutional trading, Paul Orford as Head of Institutional Sales.

Mr. Styllas is a widely recognized and influential industry figure in Cyprus, with 20 years experience in the financial and banking industry, helping firms to get registered and licensed in Cyprus as well as advising them on liquidity solutions, and Mr. Orford is viewed as the central point of the Cyprus FX industry. Being a regular commentator on the FX industry media with regard to important matters relating to liquidity provision and the structure of retail brokerages.

Capitalization and the ability to gain credit from Tier 1 banks is one of the moot points of 2016 for may prime brokerages. Being able to maintain relationships with banks is now vital, along with being able to display a good capital base and continual order flow being paramount to ensuring the continued extension of aggregated liquidity.

Thus, it is Cyprus’ very first prime brokerage which offers Tier 1 bank liquidity to support the vast number of brokerages on the island and can also provide such institutional services to firms abroad. For the first time ever, companies can go to a Cypriot prime brokerage for Tier 1 liquidity.

Mr. Orford, very much an advocate of the agency execution model, has been instrumental in bringing a prime brokerage to Cyprus, having explained to FinanceFeeds on several occasions that brokers are in need of a local firm via which they can process orders on a direct market access basis rather than warehousing trades.

Speaking to Mr. Orford today in Limassol, Cyprus, FinanceFeeds took a close look at the ethos behind the new firm.

“When we were designing the service for AMB Prime, the common feedback we received from long term partners, was that they were looking for 3 key things in a service, those being fast processing, minimal reliability issues and a cost efficient solution from one price feed” explained Mr. Orford.

Mr. Orford explained “We wanted to reduce the bureaucracy associated with multiple price feeds for FX and CFDs. As we have all been stalwarts in this sphere for a long time, we know that we are providing what the industry is looking for based upon the feedback from many of our long term associates.”

Mr. Orford provided a comprehensive outline of the service which AMB Prime will now offer, one major priority being the saving of money for brokerages. The company offers one FIX API for both FX & CFDs, and commissions are calculated together to significantly reduce the cost of the end user.

“We have partnered with the leading names in institutional technology offering both reliability and stability, which enables savings when a broker connects to us and our partners” said Mr. Orford.

He went on further to say “We understand the competitive nature of today’s market, and as a result we maintain world leading relationships with multiple prime brokerages offering huge depth of market and consistently low spreads”.

Furthermore, Mr. Orford explained that AMB Prime offers non corporate Institutional grade trading account with LP spreads and very low commissions.

“Based on the interest we have had already, we believe that we have a product here that can not only assist in saving the end user a tremendous amount of money, moreover they can also streamline their operation saving time” he concluded.