Does this mean, I thought, that the market’s migration would now happen through the back door? Had Michael Spencer, Icap’s chief executive, pulled a fast one by buying EBS on the cheap and seeing off the threat from more exchange-like entities, such as FXMarketSpace? Would EBS now become formally the FX exchange?
Actually, no. Icap believes that there are benefits to operating as an exchange in various rinky-dink products. FX isn’t one of these. And as the company’s stellar interim results showed, FX is clearly not broken, so why fix it? I won’t go on again about what a bargain Icap got when it bought EBS, but it clearly did.
Thanks for your interest in Euromoney!
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