Goldman Sachs has won the award for electronic forex prime brokerage by the tightest of margins – both it and UBS have extremely flexible offerings, and they are both ahead of most other banks.
Nonetheless, Goldman Sachs has earned its top ranking. The site is well designed, and the homepage provides an immediate view of today’s transactions, upcoming valuations and expirations, daily and cumulative P&L, and a settlement summary. Neat bar charts demonstrate how much credit the client has used with each counterparty and how much credit remains with each.
The whole site can be customized by clients. Soon they will be able, for example, to drag a box showing live futures prices, or indeed any other data or application they want, into the site.
As with the other best platforms on the market, it can receive deal data from other banks and from prime brokerage clients in a range of formats. It can read clients’ order management systems, take uploaded Excel files and so on. Alternatively, other banks can give up trades by using the platform to rekey deal details.
Clients can confirm trades and view upcoming fixings and expirations on options and non-deliverable forwards, although this calendar does not stretch out as far as UBS’s.