The 2025 FX market repeatedly tested liquidity provision at the point where it is hardest to sustain: pricing in the absence of a reliable reference. Tariff announcements, shifting correlations between the dollar and risk assets, a giant crash in silver – all these produced moments when the market had no agreed level. How banks behaved in those moments showcased their liquidity strength, and UBS was consistently among the first to commit a price rather than wait for one.
That distinction mattered more in 2025, because the news that moved markets came out of the White House during the East Coast afternoon, which is the Asian morning. Risk was repricing while much of London slept.
The numbers support the claim. That is a structural advantage rather than a vanity metric: less external hedging means less market impact and signalling risk, which supports tighter, steadier pricing, which attracts more flow.
Providing liquidity is about more than just scale. It’s about delivering consistent execution across currencies, products and market conditions
Eric Li
The infrastructure had to hold up for any of that to work. All of it is built in-house, and deliberately so.
Off-the-shelf components can get a competitor to a working platform but not to a durable edge, which comes from decades of incremental development on code that the bank controls. Cobra, the rebuilt order management system that sits behind internal matching and liquidity recycling, is the current expression of that: a multi-year internal project that moved UBS off legacy order infrastructure and now allows far more of the order book to be managed electronically.
What keeps the proposition distinctive is what sits alongside the machine. Large parts of FX remain only partly electronified, including options, short-term interest rate products, emerging markets and precious metals. UBS runs more than 100 FX traders across Singapore, Zurich, London and New York for exactly those markets. Clients told the bank that during last year’s dislocations, the ability to speak to a trader who had seen it before, on top of an executable price, was worth a great deal.
“Providing liquidity is about more than just scale,” says Eric Li, global head of FX trading and head of global markets, ASEAN. “It’s about delivering consistent execution across currencies, products and market conditions. By combining strong internalisation, intelligent pricing and resilient infrastructure, we’ve built a liquidity capability that clients can depend on, particularly when liquidity is needed most.”
Judged against the criteria for this award – depth and continuity of liquidity, pricing consistency, breadth of coverage and reliability under stress – UBS’s case rests on evidence rather than assertion. Its internalisation rate and volume growth are franchise metrics, but each is traceable to a client outcome: narrower spreads, fewer rejects, higher fill rates and capacity that held when volumes jumped. The bank consistently demonstrated a combination of scale, in-house technology and traders in the less electronified corners of the market that placed it ahead of the pack in 2025.
