Perhaps like many, my first reaction when I heard that David Ogg had left his role as head of Lava FX, was to add two and two together and conclude that Citi was about to pull the plug on its subsidiary and trigger the long-awaited consolidation in the platform space. However, it seems that perhaps I should have paid a bit more attention in my maths lessons all those years ago, because this time I got the sum wrong.
The word coming out is that Lava is seeing decent volume on its ECN and newer interbank platform, which went live in December. I rang around the Euromoney top 10, and it seems that six of them have hooked up. A couple declined to confirm one way or the other, and one said that it was looking at it, but it was a case of prioritising IT efforts. On balance, the feedback edged towards the positive. “It is actually pretty good – the volumes are very decent and we find it a good liquidity source,” was one. However, one major player described Lava as still being weak, while another said he had not noticed any increase in flow.