Citi has partnered with Rapid Addition, a provider of electronic trading platforms, the multinational firm announced this Wednesday. Under the agreement, Rapid Addition will become one of the bank’s core FIX platform partners for currency trading.
According to a statement released today, Citi has chosen Rapid Addition because of the company’s latency performance and scalability to meet business requirements.
In particular, Citi has integrated two aspects from Rapid Addition into its pricing technology for spot foreign exchange (Forex ) transactions - the Rapid Addition FIX engine and the Rapid Addition Hub platform.
Clients of Citi can connect to its spot FX transactions in co-locations across London, Tokyo, New York, and Singapore. The Rapid Addition FIX engine provides speed for low latency trading, whereas the Rapid Addition Hub platform delivers scalability in client on-boarding and configuration.
Commenting on the partnership, Mark Meredith, Global Head of FX E-Trading and Algorithmic Execution at Citi, said: “It is vitally important that we are highly competitive in the field of API trading, and key factors contributing to that are latency and stability characteristics. Rapid Addition’s technology has enabled this and helped us meet our primary goal of growing our relevance in this space."
“It has also given us secondary benefits such as reducing server footprint by some 70% and ensuring we meet regulatory obligations with regard to scalability. More importantly, it allows us to easily deploy our unique value proposition to clients, whether that be our price construction engine, execution algorithms, or Liquidity calibration tools. We are confident that we now have a platform that allows us to constantly evolve our business to meet the needs of our clients.”
Citi's mixed signals on FX
The partnership announced today is part of Citi’s ongoing investment in technology, which has made the bank a leading player in the electronic trading segment, which now represents 80 percent of global customer FX trading volume.
However, as Finance Magnates recently reported, sources revealed that Citigroup is reducing its global ambitions as a major FX trading powerhouse, cutting the number of third-party platforms it gives currency quotes to 15 from 45 by the first quarter of 2020.
“We are delighted to partner with a market leader in such a key area of their business. Our work with Citi demonstrates the value of Rapid Addition’s technology in enhancing electronic workflow in the FX arena,” added Rapid Addition’s CEO, Mike Powell.
“As market fragmentation, best execution and trade automation continue to become common themes across all major asset classes, our customers are increasingly leveraging our scalable enterprise technology to address business challenges across their trading workflow.”
