Customer Description

Top-ten global bank

Strategic Objective

The bank sought to become a top player in the global FX market.
It wanted to take an aggressive leap forward, dramatically expanding its FX customer flow and profit, while establishing a long-term technological advantage in FX trading. The bank also wanted to build a highly customized system, retaining the bulk of its development work in-house, yet leveraging outside expertise and products to achieve a faster, more elegant implementation.

Business Requirements

The bank wanted more business and higher margins. It could gain business with better prices, but that would tighten margins. To compensate, the bank needed smarter pricing and faster execution—it required better market access, state-of-the-art pricing algorithms, more sophisticated e-commerce, and smarter auto-hedging and risk management.

The new system also had to be fast, global, reliable, scalable, and flexible. For a long-term competitive advantage, it would not be enough to scale to support thousands of external customers, hundreds of internal users, and huge volumes of streaming data. The system would also have to enable the bank to deploy new capabilities quickly and easily as its strategy evolved.

Project
Results

Within a year, the bank had a 24-hour, worldwide, seamlessly integrated FX trading system and had become a top player in the global FX market. Its system linked multiple geographical sites (New York, London, Tokyo) in real-time, providing a unified worldwide trading enterprise with shared pricing, order execution, and risk management. Capabilities included manual and automated trading, global market aggregation with dynamic smart order routing, auto-hedging, model-driven trading, low-latency pricing, real-time price streams to external venues, real-time risk management, e-commerce, and a single visual interface for all FX trading. Implementation highlights:

• Using Broadway’s software, the bank’s brand new “prop algo” trading desk required less than four months to build and deploy automated trading models running 24/5. The models use Broadway’s Market Connectors™, Market Aggregator™, and Position Server™.
• Using Broadway’s software, the bank’s IT department built and deployed its own auto-hedging component. The component uses Broadway’s Order Router™, Market Connectors™, and Market Aggregator™.
• Using Broadway’s software, the bank’s IT department successfully built and deployed its own state-of-the-art pricing engine that integrated seamlessly with the bank’s legacy price distribution platform.
• Broadway and the bank’s IT department worked jointly to connect the bank’s new pricing engine to a retail FX trading platform. The connection brought an order of magnitude more ticket volume than the bank’s previous pricing and risk management systems had been able to handle.
• Broadway built and deployed a custom Trader Desktop™ visual interface for the bank’s new system in less than three months.

Ongoing Developments

The bank continues to partner with Broadway to grow and expand its capabilities in global FX trading. The bank’s Broadway-based FX trading system continues to advance and capture new business. The system runs across hundreds of servers globally, with hundreds of custom applications providing a comprehensive range of financial services pertaining to FX.