Exclusive Interview: In talks with oneZero’s Andrew Ralich

LR: What is special about oneZero? What sets it apart from the other Liquidity Providers out there?

Andrew: oneZero isn’t actually a liquidity provider; rather we are a technology company that enables a vast array of financial organizations to distribute and consume liquidity, allowing them to expand their businesses and grow.

At the core of oneZero’s offerings is the Hub, which has specific feature sets for different types of clients. While other companies offer piece-meal or disparate solutions, oneZero’s architecture offers clients a complete trading solution and is therefore the foundation of our deep client relationships.

LR: Earlier this year oneZero launched its Institutional Hub. Tell us more about it – who is it designed for? In what ways does it help your clients to better manage their business?

Andrew: oneZero’s Institutional Hub was designed specifically for the needs of the institutional audience with a trading user interface and advanced features based on the preferences of today’s brokers. It allows a user to define trading criteria with advanced aggregation, price formation, customized distribution, risk management and systematic hedging.

The Institutional Hub is a price and risk management system which gives institutional brokers and banks full control of aggregation, pricing, market access and risk management. The Retail Hub enables retail brokers to manage their liquidity to reduce costs and spreads while controlling risk. Liquidity Provider Hub gives liquidity providers access to our distribution network. The respective Hubs work together with EcoSystem and Data Source. EcoSystem is where our network of over 200 retail and institutional brokers, banks and liquidity providers come together for liquidity distribution and access to unique flow, with direct market access to exchanges and clearing providers. And finally, Data Source facilitates conversations between providers and consumers of liquidity through neural data and analytics.

LR: oneZero recently released its Algorithmic Pricing Module. How does it help your institutional clients?

Andrew: The Algorithmic Pricing Module allows our increasing number of institutional clients to fine-tune their price function in new ways. Clients can choose relevant parameters through a combination of API inputs and exposed user-defined settings.

The price creation tool uses brokers’ own data constructs and algorithms that can access market data, market risk positions, and other unique information. Combined with oneZero’s Institutional Hub, it offers a coding interface that enables clients to insert their own native code for greater control of the elements used and the construction of the price algorithms.

LR: In what forms of technological innovation has oneZero invested? In what ways do these technological developments address the needs of your clients?

Andrew: oneZero is committed to giving customers the options and flexibility they need to succeed. That has meant prioritizing enhanced data storage, collection and analysis tools, along with the ability to create customized liquidity pools based on client segmentation rules.

EcoSystem unites oneZero’s vast network, providing access to unique flow and direct market access to exchanges and clearing providers, across a variety of asset classes including foreign exchange, commodities, CFDs, futures, cash equities and digital currencies. The wide range of connectivity options, combined with industry-leading technology, empowers expansion into new markets, saving time and enabling the right strategic choices for a particular business.

Data Source is a next generation cloud-based business intelligence toolkit that stores quote and trade data. oneZero then transforms that data into analytics that can lead to a better, stronger relationship between brokers and liquidity providers. These interactive, visual web-based analytics allow institutional brokers to gain visibility, on a deeper, more granular level, of their client flow and associated hedges. This allows for the mapping of relationships between liquidity providers, and gives a full perspective on changes in pricing and flow over time. We at oneZero call these individual connections streams and are committed to both offering more of these streams and providing companies the analytics they need to determine what streams are right for them under different market conditions.

LR: What changes have you noticed in the FX liquidity world after the volatile year we’ve had?

Andrew: The pandemic was an accelerant for progress shifts in the market. Volumes accelerated while infrastructure and people became more physically spread out. That meant, in order to function as an effective liquidity provider or broker, institutions needed to have the technical capability to understand changes and make quick adjustments. All of the functionality, technical knowledge and expertise oneZero spent years developing came together in allowing our clients to navigate a complex environment that varied widely from trading session to trading session and from pair to pair.

Our systems have been performing as usual. They are well-equipped to manage volume spikes as a matter of course, since our technology is used to handling tens of millions of trade messages daily.

LR: What can we expect from oneZero in the near future?

Andrew: oneZero is committed to continual improvement. Just as the company allows its clients to quickly adapt to changes in the market, oneZero’s team of developers build and enhance features in line with the needs of the market.

A particular focus at the moment is deeper connections between data/analytics and real-time systems. We want to further empower real-time decision making with deep data analytics on historical data sets, and will be rolling out solutions in the future that expand our capability in this area.