In some cases, this has become a valuable revenue stream and even when it is not, banks will continue to try to capture it as a source of volume alone.
For the retail platforms, the emergence in recent months of two new liquidity providers will be extremely welcome. Sources say that both Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs are aggressively touting for their business. Goldman Sachs is supposedly promising that it will stream the tightest price in the market in any currency pair in return for exclusivity over the retail aggregator’s flow. It will be interesting to see the impact that Goldman’s and Lehman’s push into retail will have on their 2009 rankings in the Euromoney FX poll.