Now in its 32nd year, it is the industry's largest, most respected survey.

The Japanese bank’s acquisition of former Lehman Brothers businesses has greatly enhanced its position in the FX market. Alexandra Fletcher reports.

BNP Paribas and Société Générale both broke into the top six of banks catering for non-financial institutions in this year’s FX survey. Trevor Carr reports.

Saudi Arabia’s central bank governor, Mohammed Al Jasser, wants long-term global banks in the Kingdom. Meanwhile he is taking a leading role in developing the GCC’s single currency, as he tells Dominic O’Neill.

Builds out onshore presence in markets; Focuses on project finance, lending in banking

Technology and emerging markets will be key battlegrounds in FX but success lies in the size of the liquidity pool.

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 is not intended to be an accurate reflection of total global foreign exchange activity. 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.

It is pointless writing about much other than European sovereign debt and the euro this week. Though as the UK election looms next week, sterling does get a look-in again.

On Tuesday State Street Global Markets released the results of the State Street Investor Confidence Index for April.

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Forget the elections, this is the only survey that matters

Angie, Angie, when will that bailout dough appear?

UBS in London have confirmed this week that Graham Clapham will join them as director, FX hedge fund sales.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch in London can confirm this week that Jacquie Steel will be joining them in June as a director in the institutional sales team in London.

Anthony Woolley, global head of FX e-commerce IT, left HSBC on April 12 after less than a year with them and during the new platform build up. Woolley came from Citi in July 2009.

Richard Leighton, global head of FX at Standard Chartered, has decided to retire, bringing to an end one of the most successful careers in the industry over the past couple of decades.

Richard Leighton, global head of FX at Standard Chartered, has decided to retire, bringing to an end one of the most successful careers in the industry over the past couple of decades.

Currensee, a kind of Facebook for the retail FX market, have a rather jolly idea that trading should be interactive, fun and social.

Shortly after bonus time every bank expects a few staff to leave. But ‘a few’ doesn’t describe departures from Barclays over the last week or two – it’s a full-blown exodus according to market sources.

Louis Bacon’s latest investor letter, warning of “the potential breakdown of the European Monetary Union”, was all over the wires on Wednesday.

Volumes on FX platform Hotspot continue to be healthy. Total volume for the first quarter exceeded $2 trillion. Average daily volume for March, at $32.5 billion, was slightly off from February’s figure of $34.6 billion.

Thomson Reuters this week unveiled Elektron, a global, ultra-high speed network and hosting environment that enables financial firms to access and share information faster and more cost-effectively.

Icap announced this week that their data service, Icap Fix has been added to one of the largest Japanese financial information vendors, Quick.

Gain announced on Wednesday that it has launched a new Arabic service under its Forex.com UK division, taking advantage of the growth of the retail market in the Middle East.

Operational burdens are getting lighter for investor-clients.

Baxter Financial Services announced this week that it is strengthening its offering in multibank FX trading and netted clearing by integrating with TradeSense software.

EUR/USD has been flirting with a 1.32 handle and has a decent chance of breaking through the year’s low. So it might seem strange to wonder if the FX market is getting a little bored with the Greece story. Longer-dated Greek yields continue to break records but the FX response lacks energy. This is despite Thursday’s news that, according to Reuters, “Eurostat, the EU’s statistics office, said Greece’s budget deficit would be nearly a full point wider than first expected” (more like fifth expected I’d have thought) and despite the news that Louis Bacon has joined George Soros in pointing out (the bleeding obvious) that the eurozone could breakdown (that was Bacon, Soros said break up). It looks like the triggering of the Greek bailout is in the price (there are rumours this morning that Greece will make some formal application today for the bailout to be triggered). Greece’s problems will remain after the bailout together with the probability of eventual default but, if social unrest doesn’t escalate, the country might take a back seat for a while.

Nikolaus Giesbert is to head fixed income and currency sales at Commerzbank’s Corporates & Markets division. He was previously head of financial institutional coverage, Europe, at Morgan Stanley.

Peter Jerrom has been promoted to global head of FX derivatives at UniCredit. Jerrom was previously the chief operating officer for FX derivatives at the bank. Before UniCredit, Jerrom was head of FX exotics at Lehman but, together with Will Vogel, opted to join UniCredit rather than get on the bus to Nomura when Lehman collapsed. Before Lehman, Jerrom was at BarCap and Citi.