Australia’s smaller FX brokers are scrambling to offload market-making, to avoid higher capital charges.
Australia continues to be one of the hottest FX markets out there. The country’s Forex and CFD sectors continue to grow and — more importantly — Australia is an important base for attracting clients in fast growing Asian markets, specifically China. Today comes word that Switzerland’s Dukascopy has signed Australia’s Forex FS, a mid-sized Australian FX broker, as a white label client of its JForex platform.
This is actually Dukascopy’s second white label client in Australia, the other being Halifax Investment Services. Dukascopy also recently signed similar white label deals with AvaTrade in Japan (click here for the LeapRate “real story” on that one), and with Integral Menkul Değerler in Turkey.
As Australia’s financial regulator ASIC has increased its required minimum capital for market-makers from AUD$ 50,000 — by a factor of 10x — to AUD$ 500,000 earlier this year (a number that will double again to AUD$ 1 million early next year), smaller FX brokers in the country have been scrambling to offload their market making activities to larger domestic or foreign firms. We expect to continue to see more such quasi-consolidation in the Australian market, which will benefit mainly the larger domestic Australian firms such as AxiTrader, as well as those domestic firms operating as licensed entities in the country, such as Saxo Bank, FXCM, and AvaFX.
For the complete Dukascopy press release click here.
For more on the global Forex industry see the LeapRate-Dow Jones Forex Industry Report.