Looking back at the most intriguing and popular industry news from the past week between 20th and 24th of July on LeapRate.
LiquidityMatch LLC’s wholly owned subsidiary FXSpotStream LLC added Barclays back in February as the 14th liquidity providing bank to join. FXSpotStream announced that Barclays’ liquidity is now available to clients in production via the FXSpotStream Service. The existing liquidity providing banks on FXSpotStream include: Bank of America, BNP Paribas, Citi, Commerzbank AG, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, MUFG, Standard Chartered, State Street and UBS as liquidity providers.
UK online trading company IG Group Holdings plc released its preliminary trading update for the FY20 financial year ending 31 May 2020. The Group reports successful financial year enhanced by Q4 market volatility. Full year net trading revenue grew 36% to £649.2 million. Net trading revenue in Q1-Q3 rose by 9% to £389.7 million and Q4 revenue more than doubled to £259.5 million.
Brokeree Solutions, a technology provider of forex brokers solutions, appointed Julia Ilichyova as operational director. In her new role, Ilichyova will be responsible for managing the company’s overall operations, including business development, human resources, and financial management. Ilichyova brings to her new position more than 15 years of experience in finance and business development roles. She joined Brokeree Solutions in 2017.
The American market has always been troublesome for Forex brokers. On the one hand, it is the largest and most lucrative market segment. On the other hand, the US Forex regulations have been stringent, so only a few companies bothered with the American market. However, there is a real chance that the USA soon will lose its reputation of a tempting, but extremely challenging market and will become a safe haven for the largest Forex brokers. Some the factors involved may cause the US government to become more lenient towards Forex brokers, some may make broker’s life outside the US much worse than it is now, and some may lead more brokers into giving the USA a shot.
Kourosh Khanloo, Managing Director of FXCM Germany, has been active in the financial sector for several years. Most recently, he was responsible – also at FXCM Germany – for Sales & Service in the foreign exchange trading division. Due to his previous employment at an exchange location he also has expertise in the financial markets. Khanloo joined LeapRate to discuss the market situation in Germany and how FXCM Germany has been managing through this challenging period.
Global FX broker ATFX announced the launch of three new tech CFDs – Zoom, Adobe and NVIDIA on its trading platform. ATFX enhanced its offerings and product suite with the three new CFDs. They are a popular way for investors to actively trade financial markets because of their ease of execution and the ability to go long or short. CFD trading is beneficial because it enables investors to speculate on the rising or falling prices of fast-moving global financial markets. Additionally, clients are able to easily predefine stops and limits that allow positions to close at a specified price, as well as creating price alerts to be informed of any big moves when trading with ATFX.
The World Federation of Exchanges (WFE), the global industry group for exchanges and CCPs, began developing common taxonomy for stablecoins which will also cover crypto-assets more broadly. The development of taxonomy will create common regulatory classifications of the sablecoins in response to their recent growth before they fragment any further. The WFE asked the Financial Stability Board to create and take up global taxonomy to help drive a common understanding of whether a global stablecoin (GSC) or crypto-asset fits a certain classification or definition to reduce the difference between jurisdictions and remove regulatory dissonance.
De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB) granted the German online trading broker Flatex AG declaration of no-objection (DNO) on the acquisition of 100% of the shares in European brokerage company DeGiro. Flatex will execute the purchase through a mix of cash and shares. Up to 7.5 million new Flatex shares will be issued to the shareholders of DeGiro precluding the subscription rights of existing shareholders. Flatex will also pay on a debt-and-cash-free basis EUR 36.4 million in cash.
Banque de France announced building a central bank digital currency in partnership with Soc Gen, HSBC and six other partners. The selected applicants will propose experiments which will allow exploration of new ways to exchange financial instruments (excluding crypto-assets) for central bank money. The experiments will also be testing the settlement in central bank digital currency to improve executing conditions for cross-border payments and revising the arrangements for making central bank money available.
UBS has agreed to pay $10 million in settling charges brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for “flipping” municipal bond offering. The SEC filed an order claiming that over a period of four years, UBS improperly allocated bonds intended for retail customers to parties known in the industry as “flippers”. Then they immediately resold or “flipped” the bonds to other broker-dealers at a profit. SEC alleges that UBS registered representatives knew that flippers were not eligible for retail priority. SEC’s order also finds that UBS registered representatives assisted more than 2,000 trades with flippers, allowing UBS to obtain bonds for its own inventory, thereby circumventing the priority of orders set by the issuers and improperly obtaining a higher priority in the bond allocation process.
London-based crypto liquidity provider Enigma Securities announce its partnership with algorithmic trading software company AlgoTrader. Enigma will also join AlgoTrader’s recently launched advanced order and execution management platform WIRESWARM, allowing financial institutions to trade at multiple regulated crypto liquidity venues. Enigma and AlgoTrader are teaming up to build a better solution to allow for the secure entry of institutional investors into crypto markets.
Global provider of trading solutions QuantHouse announced its partnership with trading and order routing applications developer EliData to integrate QuantFEED market data into the EliData Smart Order Router (SOR). Italian software house EliData develops trading and order routing applications for the financial markets, as well as solutions for data exchange between front office and back office systems. EliData SOR using QuantHouse market data has already been deployed by a tier one financial institution in Spain.
