This expansion is in preparation for the implementation of new regulations for FX options that will make it mandatory to trade the instruments on swap execution facilities, and clear trades through clearing houses. SurfacExchange has hired Yvan Bedouet as president and chief operating officer, Ine Hoekstra Gustafsson as head of business development for the EMEA region and Jena Axelrod as managing director, sales in North America.
The trading platform, which has been live for nine months, has signed up 29 banks, hedge funds and proprietary trading firms to the platform, the firm says in a statement.
“We are joined by three entrepreneurially driven FX derivatives professionals, as the growing client base and pipeline started to stretch our hardworking start-up team,” says Evgeni Mitkov, CEO and founder of SurfacExchange in the statement.
Bedouet has previously worked at Louis Dreyfus Investment Group (LDIG), where he led the firm’s effort to launch its Alpha Fund. Prior to LDIG, he was a senior trader at FX Concepts and QTS.
Hoekstra Gustafsson joins from FXall, where she was a sales director, having previously worked at GFI, Calyon and eSpeed. Axelrod joins from Profit & Loss, where she was content director, having worked at FXMarketSpace before that.
The multi-dealer options market place was given a boost last month, after a report published by the Committee on Payment and Settlement Systems and the International Organization of Securities Commissions, said that clearing houses would not be required to guarantee settlement of FX options, as had been stipulated in their original principles for financial market infrastructures.
The original draft had been a stumbling block for the options market, which was creating an impasse between the bank market makers and the clearing houses, and was slowing the process towards implementation of the new trading and clearing rules for FX options.