UOB announces deployment of Chronicle Software solution for FX Pricing
United Overseas Bank Limited (UOB) has announced that it has deployed the EFX solution from Chronicle Software for FX pricing and trade engine. This would help improve its liquidity and reduce latency helping its users with better price discovery.
UOB has its headquarters in Singapore and the trading engine would also be located in Singapore. The aim is to make the trade engine as close to the customers as possible so that the latency is reduced and the customers get the best FX pricing and this would then be in tune with the aim of Singapore to become an e-trading FX hub in Asia.
Mr. Leslie Foo, Head of Group Global Markets, UOB, said, “Through our new electronic FX pricing and trade engine, UOB is well-positioned to help our customers seize opportunities arising from the strong institutional FX flows in Asia and Singapore’s status as a fast-growing FX trading hub. Our collaboration with Chronicle combines their technological capabilities with UOB’s deep understanding of our customers’ FX trading needs. Using Chronicle’s solution as the building blocks, we will continue to deepen our capabilities to provide our customers with faster access to global FX markets.”
In recent years, there has been a big growth in the economy of the Asian region as a whole and with that, there has been a great increase in institutional FX flows and the bank hopes to capitalize on this inflow as Singapore is the hub of financial services in Asia. By improving the technology, UOB hopes to capture a large part of these FX flows.
Mr. Peter Lawrey, CEO of Chronicle Software, said, “We are delighted to support UOB in their FX business and we look forward to continuing our close working relationship with them. Chronicle’s EFX solution offers reliability, ease of deployment, and speed of development. We are pleased to be able to help UOB deliver their solution to market quickly and our recently added Singapore office[1] will be able to provide strong local support.”
Recently, the UOB bank, as well as many other banks in the region, has also been mulling to acquire Citi’s assets in the Asian region as part of its continued growth strategy. The competition for a share of the pie in the Asian region has been hotting up in recent times with Nomura also starting up its e-FX pricing and trading engine in Singapore. This was the fourth such EFX engine for Nomura and it just shows how important the banks are viewing the FX business in this region.
This move by UOB seems to have come at the right time with business and FX flows expected to continue to be high in the coming months as the region recovers from the pandemic.
