Equiti Capital Bolsters FX Services With Addition of NatWest as Second Prime Broker

May 10, 2021 - Multi-asset prime if prime liquidity provider Equiti Capital, a subsidiary of Equiti Group, announced today that its FX Desk has onboarded NatWest Markets as another Prime Broker.

Equiti Capital’s FX Desk runs an agency model providing liquidity to the buyside.

According to today's press announcement, following the growth of Equiti Capital's FX Desk in recent months, coupled with the need to use multiple Prime Brokers to diversify risk, it went to market in 2020 to appoint a second prime broker. NatWest Markets, widely renowned for the flexibility of their approach, expansive credit access and dedicated and professional support teams, emerged as a natural front runner.

Benedict Sears, Head of Equiti Capital’s FX Desk, said: “NatWest Markets offers versatile solutions that deliver a quicker time to market, expediting the process by which we establish lines of credit when facing Asset Managers, Family Offices, Hedge Funds, and Local Banks.”

Onboarding NatWest Markets will help to facilitate Equiti Capital FX Desk’s ability to provide liquidity in FX derivatives including NDFs, forwards, swaps, vanilla and exotic options.

Marcus Butt, Head of Global FX Prime Brokerage at NatWest Markets, said: “We are very pleased that Equiti Capital have recognised our PB solutions as market leading and are looking forward to supporting Equiti Capital’s continued growth.

Another element to Equiti Capital FX Desk's continued growth is its voice execution offering and unique macroeconomic insights, aiming to provide a superior service for Funds than that of what they expect from their bank counterparties due to reductions across bank Sales & Trading desks.

"As a desk we have been heavily working on building out our electronic CLOB (Central Limit Order Book), we also have found great success in matching off the interest of clients in the Options market which allows the firms to get in and out of positions around mid, thus reducing the spreads they pay. We work hand in hand with local market makers trying to match off the interest they have with those of our buyside clients, resulting in unique axes and pricing.

“We find clients are often looking for help in executing large orders, with an emphasis on reducing market impact. Our Desk is able to help clients with this while maintaining a level of market access which would be unfeasible to maintain for a Buyside firm in the fragmented OTC FX market,” added Sears.

The type of clients engaging in the FX market with Equiti Capital’s FX Desk range from banks hedging corporate flow, equity and fixed income funds who hedge their FX exposure, to proprietary FX risk takers.

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