just now
March 09, 2021 - In what could be a major boost for firms looking to add more localised connectivity for South East Asian clients from Singapore, Foreign Exchange (FX) technology provider Integral has announced that its SaaS based IntegralFX service is now available in Singapore’s SG1 data center. Over the past 2-3 years, there has been a steady stream of Primary Bank and Non-Bank market makers locating their pricing engines in SG1. Now those prices are able to be distributed via one of the major cloud-based FX aggregators / White Label solutions.
The market makers that have announced that they have either gone live with, or plan to establish, eFX pricing engines in Singapore include UBS (the first global bank to announce its plans to launch eFX pricing in Singapore in September 2018); Standard Chartered (live since January 2020); JP Morgan (live since April 2020); and Barclays, Goldman Sachs, BNY Mellon, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank, CITI, who have all shown their commitment to setting up a pricing engine in Singapore.In September 2021, RBC Capital Markets launched its Singapore-based eFX server and pricing engine. Deutsche Bank completed its first live trades on its SG1 eFX trading hub in October last year.
In November 2020, Singapore bank UOB announced that it is also setting up a pricing engine in Singapore.
In September 2019, Euronext FX (previously "Fastmatch") announced that it had gone live with local trading in Singapore.
Retail FX focused aggregator and bridge provider PrimeXM announced its first trades in Singapore SG1 in August 2021, although volumes seem to have been rising only modestly since, reaching $1.75 billion in total during December 2021
Integral becomes the first complete cloud-based FX workflow SaaS platform in the SG1 data center, co-located with multiple market makers and takers. The benefits for local clients include the ability to deploy pricing engines, algos, connectivity and distribution tools immediately, as well as making prices, obtaining liquidity and hosting algorithms in a low latency configuration.
Harpal Sandhu, CEO of Integral, commented, “We’re delighted to be able to offer IntegralFX locally in SG1 and extending the many benefits of our FX workflow technology to the growing buy-side in Singapore, the 3rd largest FX center globally. Due to the modular nature of our cloud-based SaaS technology, clients can take individual components or together as a full stack to meet their exact needs. Making IntegralFX available locally underpins our commitment to Singapore and wider Asian region.”
Lim Cheng Khai, Executive Director of Financial Markets Development Department at the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), also commented, “Our strategic initiative to build Singapore to become the e-trading and price discovery centre for Asia is gaining momentum and we’re delighted that Integral is launching its SaaS service in Singapore. The high concentration of regional buy-side players looking for better connectivity & e-trading solutions is growing and we’re very pleased to welcome a global technology player to help support the growth of financial services locally.”
Ken Ong, CEO of KGI Securities, added, "At KGI Securities, we focus on precious metals and Asian NDFs, so we’re very happy to support initiatives that make it easier for customers to trade these in a Singapore data center. Integral has proven to be an excellent partner for us and we’re happy to support them in this initiative".
