The desk is run by Ross Taylor, who most recently ran FX sales at Natixis. Taylor will have an initial team of up to seven people. Gain is also looking at opening an execution desk in Asia within six months, Taylor says. As with wholesale FX markets, the growth in trade volumes over the last five years has been a product of the move to electronic trading, allowing retail brokers to achieve higher market penetration through easier connectivity and allowing clients to trade more frequently. But while electronic trading increasingly dominates the business, Gain GTX is keen to ensure it can always offer its clients a human ear when they need it. The firm says it will continue to invest in both human and electronic infrastructure.
“We have always had a tremendous electronic offering but are now complementing that with the execution desks the banks have always had,” says Taylor. “This is a reversal of what the banks have done, which was to develop their electronic platforms to keep up with demand on that side.”
“While many of our clients exclusively access the liquidity of GTX marketplace online, other clients, on occasion, require the help of a professional desk, whether it be for swaps, option structures, or attentive treatment of their orders, as well as timely market updates and commentary,” says Vincent Sangiovanni, chief operating officer of Gain GTX, to whom Taylor reports.
Retail firms are often as sophisticated as the bank single-dealer trading platforms because they have had to develop technology capabilities to serve their active traders. This has led some to look beyond their traditional domain to servicing institutional clients, who usually only deal with banks. In April, for example, Gain launched GTX Direct, its FX prime brokerage service, without which, Taylor says, the launching of the execution desk would not have been possible.