Deutsche Bank goes live with its FX pricing and trade engine in Singapore
Deutsche Bank has gone live with its electronic foreign exchange pricing and trading engine in Singapore, where demand for currency trading among institutional players is on the rise.
The launch is in line with the plans of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to develop the country as Asia Pacific’s FX trading hub. The nation’s markets regulator already supports several initiatives from different global banks who are in the midst of establishing their FX e-trading and pricing engines in the city-state.
This was a complex delivery, Deutsche Bank said, which included the set-up of significant local hardware, network, and server infrastructure, as well as the deployment of a host of customised applications.
BNY Mellon builds a pricing and trading engine for sophisticated FX instruments in Singapore, also part of an initiative with the MAS.
Standard Chartered was also gearing up to launch an e-trading engine that offers e-FX trading of 50 currencies in spot, forward, swaps, non-deliverable forwards (NDFs) and options, as well as commodities e-trading for both precious and base metals.
Head of APAC G10 FX Lee Merchant said: “Asia Pacific is a prime example of the ongoing decentralisation that is happening in the FX marketplace globally. We’ve set out to create a low latency trading environment so that our clients can benefit from localized price distribution and consumption, leading to improved execution results and performance of roughly 90 milliseconds, for clients in Singapore. The investment in our platform in Singapore significantly enhances Deutsche Bank’s market-leading electronic FX offering, and nicely complements our other global FX trading hubs in New York, London, and Tokyo.”
Other global banks like Barclays, J.P. Morgan, UBS, Citi, BNP Paribas, Euronext, and XTX Markets have already built their own regional trading infrastructure in the city-state.
Singapore is a key trading centre for Western banks, which have seen its e-FX trading volumes grow by double-digits over the last five years.
The news came as Germany’s largest lender was in talks with potential buyers for a wide range of its assets amid wider cuts at its US equities business, including prime brokerage and equity derivatives, part of its most dramatic overhaul in recent history.
Germany’s biggest bank also faces pressure from investors to push ahead with further cost cuts this year and pull out of businesses where it isn’t profitable, especially after the collapse of merger talks with Commerzbank.
John Zeng, Head of E-Trading FIC APAC said: “The latest expansion of electronic pricing capacity continues to strengthen our Emerging Market currencies and NDF trading platform by offering clients enhanced execution experience both in terms of transaction latency and quality of liquidity. With Singapore growing as a major liquidity hub during the Time Zone, the investment reaffirms Deutsche Bank’s strong commitment to the region and our endless pursuit to deliver the best-in-class solution to our clients.”
