Northern Trust to Set Up eFX Pricing Engine in Singapore

April 16, 2021 - Yesterday Northern Trust announced that it will set up a new electronic foreign exchange (eFX) pricing engine in Singapore, in partnership with the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS). This will be Northern Trust’s first eFX engine in Asia-Pacific.

Northern Trust joins a growing list of primary market making banks, brokers and platforms announcing the establishment of 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 Singapore. 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.

“Singapore is a key FX centre for Northern Trust and financial markets globally,” said John Turney, Head of Global Foreign Exchange at Northern Trust Capital Markets. “Establishing a regional eFX pricing engine in Singapore will enhance the service provided by our Singapore-based FX desk and complements our continued expansion of FX solutions across Asia-Pacific including currency management and Complete FX™.

In recent years, Northern Trust has launched a number of innovative FX solutions, and acquired BEx LLC, a platform providing algorithmic FX trading, global liquidity aggregation and transparency in execution and pricing to institutional clients worldwide. In addition, it announced a strategic partnership with Lumint Corporation, an innovative provider of currency management services, enhancing Northern Trust’s currency management solutions with machine learning models.

Yen Leng Ong, country executive for Southeast Asia at Northern Trust, added: “The launch of our eFX platform in Singapore demonstrates our continued commitment to deliver a broad range of sophisticated solutions to our clients in Asia-Pacific. We are excited to be a part of this joint initiative with MAS which will further develop the FX market ecosystem in Singapore, and Asia as a whole. Co-locating the pricing engine with the trading desk in Singapore, regional market participants will benefit from improved speed and enhanced pricing discovery, as well as increasingly timely and efficient execution.”

Lim Cheng Khai, executive director for Financial Markets Development at MAS said: “We welcome the launch of Northern Trust’s Asia-Pacific eFX pricing engine in Singapore. The addition of Northern Trust to our FX e-trading infrastructure will strengthen our proposition to provide efficient price discovery and trade execution to market participants in the region, and enable Northern Trust to continue to bring market leading capabilities to its clients. It also bears strong testimony to Singapore’s proposition as a global FX centre in the Asian time zone.”

Northern Trust Global Foreign Exchange, part of Northern Trust Capital Markets, provides a range of liquidity, trading, transaction processing and outsourced FX solutions for institutional investors. Northern Trust Capital Markets is comprised of a number of Northern Trust entities that provide trading and execution services on behalf of institutional clients, including foreign exchange, institutional brokerage, securities lending and transition management services.

Northern Trust has an established network of 11 offices across Asia-Pacific in Beijing, Bengaluru, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Manila, Melbourne, Pune, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney and Tokyo. It has strong relationships with some of the region’s largest central banks, sovereign wealth funds, government agencies and corporations, offering a comprehensive range of customised asset servicing, asset management and capital markets solutions.