In May Deutsche Bank will launch an entirely new FX trading platform aimed squarely at attracting flow from the retail end of the market. The platform, which is called dbFX, will initially have streaming prices in 22 currency pairs. The site, which at the moment appears to be in soft launch, will go live some time this month.
It is thought that trades from dbFX will be routed to the bank’s main client facing platform, Autobahn. According to information posted on dbFX, trading will be on a margin basis. Prices will be quoted in “lots” of 100,000 currency units and will be available 24 hours a day, from Sunday afternoons until Friday evenings.
The entry of Deutsche into the crowded retail space is likely to have a knock-on impact on the existing providers. However, at the moment the spreads that Deutsche says will be on dbFX look wide in comparison with those on other platforms. The marketing manager at one said that he was in some ways surprised that Deutsche had decided to step into the space but that in other aspects what surprised him more was that it had taken so long for the big players to target the sector.
“It will be interesting to see how it will manage the business from a compliance point of view, what spreads it will quote and the level of margining it will require,” he says. “It’s hard at the moment to make a snap assessment on the impact it will have on our business. What Deutsche terms retail might be very different from what we do – retail is a very broad term. What is significant is that banks like Deutsche have traditionally captured retail flow through people like us. It now looks like it wants to cut out the middlemen.”
