In May 2022, CME Group completed a multi-year migration to combine two leading FX trading venues through a common technology and service offering to create a platform spanning futures and options, cash (over-the-counter) and cleared FX, providing access to price discovery, execution quality and transaction cost analysis for market participants including banks, hedge funds and asset managers.
CME Group FX futures and options provide a global customer base with unique liquidity and benefits in over 40 currency pairs, spanning forwards, NDFs, swaps and options. This business saw a record year for volumes in 2022, with an average of $85.5 billion traded every day, up 24% year on year.
On March 8, it saw a new daily record of over three million futures and options contracts traded, with a notional value of $297 billion.
EBS Market's central limit order book – a regulated, anonymous matching platform that connects buyers and sellers across six continents, which has provided firm liquidity and a reference rate for almost 30 years – is now using the same technology as futures and options.
In 2022, EBS spot volumes were up 7% year on year to $65.7 billion average daily volume, a steep increase for a year featuring a big technology migration.
EBS Direct, including forwards bilateral OTC, enables liquidity consumers to choose from a range of bank and non-bank liquidity providers to create tailored liquidity pools of executable streaming prices or request for stream.
“We have improved the client trading experience and created a foundation for further innovation by migrating EBS from its distributed architecture with three separate matching engines to one, operating on CME Globex infrastructure with centralized liquidity,” says Paul Houston, global head of FX products at CME Group.
Clients can access the CME Group FX futures market and the EBS cash markets via a common interface. The firm has seen an increase in clients opting to trade both futures and options and cash at CME Group, with 12 clients starting to trade both markets for the first time since the migration.
“Our goal is to offer our clients a comprehensive suite of FX cash and futures products on one technology stack with a focus on unparalleled price discovery and liquidity, execution quality, as well as operational, capital and credit efficiencies for the full ecosystem of market participants around the globe,” says Houston.