Nomura To Launch eFX Pricing Engine in Singapore

May 17, 2021 - Nomura announced today that it will launch an electronic foreign exchange (e-FX) pricing and trading engine in Singapore, with support from the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS).

“As a global financial services group with a strong presence in Singapore, we are fully committed to supporting the city-state’s development as a major global FX hub. This initiative, which is expected to go live later this year, will help support our clients with better infrastructure for execution, improved access to liquidity and effective price discovery,” said Rig Karkhanis, Deputy Head of Global Markets and Global Head of FX and Emerging Markets, Nomura.

The launch is aligned with MAS’s strategic plan to strengthen Singapore’s standing as a major trading and corporate treasury hub, and develop its FX market to serve the growing trading and hedging needs in the region.

“MAS welcomes Nomura’s establishment of its FX pricing and matching engine in Singapore. It will bolster the build-up of a critical mass of market participants in our FX e-trading ecosystem, and strengthen Singapore’s proposition as a leading FX hub in the Asian time zone,” said Lim Cheng Khai, Executive Director, Financial Markets Development, MAS.

This will be Nomura’s fourth e-FX pricing engine following others in Tokyo, London and New York. Its ability to plug into Singapore’s e-FX infrastructure will benefit Nomura’s Asian client base, as the group continues its focus on non-deliverable forwards and G10 FX in the region.

Nomura joins a growing list of primary market making banks, brokers and platforms announcing the establishment of an eFX pricing engine in Singapore. In April, Northern Trust was the latest bank to announce setting up an eFX pricing-engine in Singapore. In recent months, a number of other firms have announced that they have either gone live with, or plan to establish, eFX pricing engines in the territory. UBS was the first global bank to announce its plans to launch eFX pricing in Singapore in September 2018. Since then, Standard Chartered (live since January 2020), JP Morgan (live since April 2020), Barclays, Goldman Sachs, BNY Mellon, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank, CITI, have all shown their commitment to setting up a pricing engine in Singapore. In October, KGI Securities announced that it was setting up Flextrade's Maxxtrader solution in SG1.

In September 2019, Euronext FX (previously "Fastmatch") announced that it had gone live with local trading in Singapore.

In November 2020, Singapore bank UOB announced that it is also setting up a pricing engine in Singapore.