FX

Despite their importance, size and liquidity the global FX markets have remained largely immune to the digital technology revolution. The reasons for this include their global scale, amorphous and fragmented structure and lack of an over-arching regulatory framework, but the principal cause of the lack of innovation is the domination of the FX markets by a small coterie of large global banks. Even the FX services for consumers developed by household name FinTechs have done little more than reduce the margins banks enjoy in one area of their business. In the wholesale FX markets large corporations, asset managers and asset owners continue to pay high prices for FX execution and hedging. This Future of Finance event engages with a group of innovators that have identified ways to challenge the banking oligopoly in FX.

Foreign exchange (FX) is routinely described as the largest and most liquid financial market in the world. And the most recent triennial survey of FX by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) reckoned daily turnover hit US$6.6 trillion in April 2019, up from $5.1 trillion in 2016.

The liquidity of the market, in particular currency pairs at particular times, is a lot less reliable than such a scale implies. And, despite the hordes of participants in every currency and country and the shift to from inter-bank trading to on-exchange trading, the FX markets are in reality controlled by an astonishingly small number of banks.