Northern Trust to Launch eFX Pricing Engine in Singapore

The Chicago-headquartered firm is building its own regional trading infrastructure in the city-state, in collaboration with the Monetary Authority of Singapore.

Northern Trust’s first electronic foreign exchange (eFX) pricing engine in Asia-Pacific will enhance the service provided by its Singapore-based FX desk and complements our continued expansion of FX solutions across Asia-Pacific, the firm said in an announcement on Friday.

«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,» Yen Leng Ong, country executive for Southeast Asia at Northern Trust, said.

More FX Solutions

The eFX engine will add to the FX solutions the firm has deployed in recent years, which includes the acquisition of BEx, a platform providing algorithmic FX trading, global liquidity aggregation and transparency in execution and pricing to institutional clients worldwide.

Northern Trust also entered into a strategic partnership with currency management services provider Lumint Corporation.

FX Trading Hub

Firms like Macquarie, Barclays, J.P. Morgan, Standard Chartered, UBS, Citi, BNP Paribas, Euronext, Jump Trading and XTX Markets have already built their own regional trading infrastructure in the city-state, under the MAS' FX Trading Hub strategy, which aims to cement Singapore as the top FX trading center in Asia Pacific.

The addition of Northern Trust to Singapore's FX e-trading infrastructure will strengthen the republic's proposition to provide efficient price discovery and trade execution to market participants in the region, Lim Cheng Khai, executive director for Financial Markets Development at MAS said in the announcement.