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November 30, 2020 – Singaporean bank UOB (United Overseas Bank) today announced that it will set up an electronic foreign exchange (FX) pricing and trading engine in Singapore, acting as the hub to service the Bank’s client franchise. The new engine will be launched by the second quarter of 2021.
UOB will take advantage of reduced latency via co-location connectivity to improve price discovery and to enhance its pricing capability, enabling the bank’s clients to access market liquidity with greater efficiency.
Mr Leslie Foo, Head of Group Global Markets, UOB, said, “By setting up our electronic FX pricing and trading engine in Singapore, UOB joins other major FX participants in serving strong institutional FX flows in Asia, enhancing price discovery and better execution for our regional clients. We look forward to playing a major role in Singapore’s fast-growing FX e-trading ecosystem.”
The establishment of UOB’s FX pricing and trading engine is supported by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and contributes to Singapore’s aim of growing its FX market into the electronic trading centre for the region.
Mr Lim Cheng Khai, Executive Director, Financial Markets Development Department of MAS, said, “UOB’s establishment of its FX pricing and matching engine in Singapore, alongside the strong pool of global FX liquidity providers here, marks another important milestone in Singapore’s role as the global FX price discovery and liquidity centre in the Asian time zone. It remains a key priority for MAS to further broaden and deepen our FX market, and we welcome more buy-side participants to join the fast-growing FX e-trading ecosystem in Singapore.”
In recent months, a number of banks 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 (now live), have all shown their commitment to setting up a pricing engine in Singapore. Last month, KGI Securities announced that it was setting up Flextrade's Maxxtrader solution in SG1.
