Something you may have noticed about the UK is that it rains a lot. And so it was when I was halfway cycling to the ATFX Connect office in London about a month ago. This led me to a Kramer-esque conundrum – do I go back, get changed and turn up late or do I continue cycling and show up drenched? I chose the latter.
Fortunately, the ATFX crew are forgiving people and were willing to overlook my disheveled appearance. It also felt like circling back to the beginning for me. As he enjoyed pointing out, ATFX Connect Managing Director Wei Zhang was one of the first people I remember really speaking to in the industry, when I was a fresh-faced lad of 23.
This was also around the same time that ATFX Connect was being set up as the brokerage group’s institutional arm. Although that was only five years ago, it feels like a lot has changed since then.
“We were the first to use that Connect branding,” said Zhang. “When we started, we had to work out what our offering would be and who we would cater to. There is always work to be done but we are almost there in terms of product and defining what we actually want to include as ‘institutional’ business.”
Today, ATFX Connect has FX prime broker relationships with leading banks via its FCA regulated group entity. With regard to the product set Zhang mentioned, the company has built an agency account, for clients with an existing PB, as well as a prime brokerage and liquidity offering, primarily for retail brokers.
“Brokers tend to actually be easier for us to work with,” said Zhang. “Because they usually want a similar set of products and services. Our ‘pure’ institutional business is much more varied and one of the things I’m happy with is that we have managed to build up a varied book of clients on that agency side. That ranges from professional traders to high street names. So it’s proof we have something to offer the full range of client types.”
Since starting TradeInformer, one of the things that has always interested me is what this kind of client actually looks like. Providing liquidity to a broker offering CFDs to retail clients makes sense to me but it’s always a bit of a mystery who this other clientele might be.
“I’m not going to tell you who they are,” laughs John Bogue, Director of Institutional Operation at ATFX. “What I would do is add to Wei’s point, which is that ATFX has built up a strong set of services so that it can work with a range of companies. Maybe you’re a small hedge fund and need a credit relationship? Or you’re a regional bank and are unhappy with your customer service and the pricing you’re getting? Whatever the case, we as a company can help solve that problem for you.”
Bogue is one of several senior executives to have joined ATFX in the last 18 months or so. That includes FXCM Founder Drew Niv, FXCM’s long-time Chief Commercial Officer Siju Daniel, and several other key hires in places like Dubai, Australia, and South Africa. Bogue himself has worked in FX for over three decades and has held senior roles at Euronext, NatWest, and Raiffeisen.
As readers can probably infer, that means he has come from a banking background, rather than the retail world. However, ATFX still has a massive retail brokerage arm, which sits alongside the ATFX Connect offering. Has that been a change?
“It’s a change but more importantly, it’s an opportunity,” Bogue told me. “When I was at FastMatch, we had 250 clients. ATFX has hundreds of thousands of clients. We are taking that retail flow, aggregating it, anonymising it, and making it serviceable to institutional clients. And the result is that we can end up putting out very interesting pricing to the street. You know, if the market is trading 20/30, there are times we can be 26 offered, when everyone else is offering 29, 30, 31. And when we show that offer, we want to sell. No call back complaints if the market subsequently goes 40 bid.”
“I think this is actually the key to our offering,” added Zhang. “What we have built means that we are now in a position where we can bridge these two worlds, where the retail world and the institutional world can interact with one another, with ATFX as an intermediary. Our aim is to grow through technology, intelligence, and teamwork, using the experience we have in the senior management team. Big ambitions – but of course our aims are to be number one in the retail sector and an important participant in global institutional markets.”
We recently spoke to one other player about how they do something similar with some of their retail clients. Over the past 12 months or so, we’ve also seen more tech providers bringing risk management solutions to the market, which could theoretically foster more of this sort of ‘bridging’ between retail flow and institutional market participants.
The interesting questions about this for me are, firstly, whether there is a risk you end up taking a view on the market when trying to bridge this gap – not something most brokers or market makers want to be doing. The other is whether there is actually anything ‘useful’ in retail flow that would make having access to it a positive for that institutional audience?
“There are definitely times where we can see a notable difference between what the retail market is doing and what the institutional market is doing,” said Zhang. “So yes, there is information that we can take from our large retail order book and create a price that is attractive to the institutional audience.”
“We are not going to start taking a view on where dollar-yen is going to be trading,” said Bogue. “What we are already doing is a lot of analysis, research, and looking at the data, to risk manage that flow. The risk team isn’t going to have the same approach all the time. It might be that, ok, we’re happy in Q1 to take on more risk but at the end of the year we want to move the needle down again.”
The impression I left the ATFX Connect office with is that the company has done a lot of the hard work needed to build up a strong institutional offering. But the team are also not ‘done’ and are still putting a lot of work into making themselves a major player in the space. And as I stepped back out on to Cornhill, the rain was gone and the sun was shining. An auspicious sign.