The firm has moved up Euromoney’s FX rankings as it broadens its client base.

Deutsche retains top ranking in global foreign exchange market; Citi jumps to second place overall in benchmark Euromoney survey

The dominance of the top-three FX banks is being challenged by the chasing pack of dealers. It isn’t just a case of luring clients onto their internal trading platforms. Clients want different things, and multi-dealer exchanges are beginning to prosper. Tom Osborn reports.

Electronic trading has transformed foreign exchange into a $4 trillion a day flow monster, delivering record revenues to those with scale. But by focusing on building their own internal platforms, banks have left themselves open to attack from the high-frequency traders, who pick them off at will and force them to hold more risk. Now the banks are fighting back. Hamish Risk reports.

When Euromoney calls to book appointments with the heads of the top 10 FX banks before the results of this year’s poll appear, the typical response from their press officers is: “Can we get back to you, he is travelling in Asia right now.” This tells you all you need to know about growth in the foreign exchange markets, with Asia as its new frontier.

The Euromoney Foreign Exchange survey is the most comprehensive quantitative and qualitative annual study available on the FX markets. The FX market is an unregulated OTC market and there are no reliable, aggregated, global statistics made available against which to benchmark the survey outside the tri-annual BIS studies. The survey also excludes a number of categories of market participant, which means that the total volume reported by the poll is not and not intended to be an accurate reflection of total global foreign exchange activity. Euromoney aims to capture client price-taking activity only. However, given the geographical and participant-type spread represented by the poll, Euromoney believes that the survey provides an accurate proxy for trends in the major areas of activity polled and accurately discerns the relative performance of the banks ranked, particularly over periods of two or more years.

Competition heats up in the global foreign exchange industry.