Independent electronic foreign exchange (eFX) trading technology provider Integral Development is opening an office in Hong Kong to expand its sales organization to eight offices. The company has also hired Margaret Ma as the office’s first sales executive. Ma recently ended a 13-year career at EBS in Hong Kong where she participated in the introduction of both eFX and fixed income products, including NDFs in regional currencies.

Interdealer broker ICAP is launching non-deliverable forwards (NDFs) on seven Asian currencies (and the Russian rouble) on its electronic foreign exchange trading platform EBS on March 3. The Asian NDFs are in Chinese renminbi, Korean won, Indian rupee, Indonesian rupiah, Malaysian ringgit, Philippine peso and Taiwan dollar, and are of one month duration. David Rutter, deputy CEO of ICAP Electronic Broking, says the NDFs will be available to EBS clients through the same channels as ICAP’s existing spot FX product offering.

Hong Kong-based financial services group Dah Sing Bank has licensed FENICS FX, a pricing and risk management system for foreign exchange options from GFI Group, for its treasury business. Says Woody Chan, general manager and head of the treasury division at Dah Sing Bank: “As Dah Sing continues to improve operational efficiency we are always looking for more effective system solutions for the group’s treasury division. We have selected GFI’s FENICS FX on the basis of its capability to provide analysis, ticketing and full STP.”

Despite retail foreign exchange (FX) market volumes having been estimated to be in the region of US$5 billion per day - equating to around two per cent of total daily FX volume globally and generating annual revenues of in excess of US$1 billion, future developments in China could hold the key to providing that “real quantum leap” in the market’s growth, an FX industry professional has contended.

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Icap is introducing a GBP/JPY tradeable currency pair. The sterling/yen currency pair will further expand ICAP’s suite of electronically traded currency pairs on the EBS platform. Icap currently offers trading in 26 currencies and precious metals across 34 currency pairs on EBS. Since the beginning of 2007, Icap has introduced electronic trading in the New Zealand dollar, Australian/New Zealand dollar currency pairs, short dated currency forwards and in platinum and palladium. Icap says it has seen high customer demand for a tradeable GBP/JPY currency pair, particularly from Europe.

The launch of a new Chinese foreign exchange trading system powered by a version of the Reuters Electronic Trading (RET) platform is being hailed as a milestone in the development of China’s FX market, enabling as it does peer-to-peer trading and trading of the domestic currency RMB against foreign currencies. The new system is the latest result of an existing relationship between the People’s Bank of China-owned China Foreign Exchange Trade System (CFETS) and Reuters and will, it is hoped, further the development of China’s inter-bank FX market and support its integration with the global market, helping to perfect the RMB exchange rate formation mechanism.

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