Hotspot FX has added five new currency pairs, sterling/yen, Canadian dollar/yen, Australian dollar/yen, Swiss franc/yen and Eurodollar/Swedish krona to its spot foreign exchange platform aimed at retail investors, broker/dealers and fund managers.
There’s nothing particularly innovative about this move given that a number of its competitors already offer these currency pairs. It will, however, be good news to FX participants who like the Hotspot model. Hotspot FX offers its trading platform technology and pricing via an application programme [API] and a FIX gateway to financial services firms.
Appeal
“Hotspot FX’s marketplace structure has always appealed to informed, sophisticated traders, who understand the benefits of bidding, offering and instantaneous, anonymous trading on neutral prices supplied by the world’s leading FX banks,” says Barry Calder, senior vice-president at Hotspot FX.
The new currency pairs are already offered on Hotspot FXi, the company’s flagship platform for institutional and banking clients. The key incentive behind this move is to offer Hotspot FX clients, and the broker/dealers and other financial intermediaries that provide the platform to their clients, a broader array of local currencies in the Australian and Asian time zones.
Interest
“Asia is a really exciting area for us at the moment,” says John Eley, president and CEO at Hotspot FX. “We are seeing more and more Asian clients coming on to the platform and trading and a great interest from financial intermediaries in the region. In particular, electronic FX trading is growing strongly among individual traders, new hedge funds and futures firms in the region.”
Hotspot expects to see increased volume in these new pairs from new direct and wholesale clients from those market segments as well as from its existing client base.
In turn, retail spot currency trading is growing significantly on electronic platforms, so providers are fast seeking out ways to accommodate this trend. “It’s still early days for us with retail clients in Asia but it is growing quickly,” adds Eley. “Retail investors have always been around but it’s the growth on retail platforms that suggests that there’s more interest in this client base. We’ve got a number of strategic alliances in the pipeline which should turbo-charge this growth.”
