Institutional Trading Platform provider Integral reported its monthly trading volumes for April 2020, which declined from a month earlier as volatility calmed after a turbulent March.
During April 2020, Integral disclosed that a total ADV of $35.1 billion was traded, which was lower by 37 percent over a monthly timeframe, compared to a record $55.6 billion reported back in March 2020.
April volumes were, however, above those reached in the same month a year ago as the company continues to integrate a slew of new buy-side systems into Integral’s OCX ECN, encouraging more trading across all transaction types, including spot, forwards, and swaps. This also highlights that market volatility is still higher and reflects extra volumes from Integral and Jefferie’s TrueFX platform.
Specifically, the latest figures reflect a 12.5 percent increase when weighed against $38.3 billion reported back in April 2018.
Integral has recently made a push into the FX prime brokerage space with the launch of TrueFX, in partnership with Jefferies FXPB. Additionally, Russia’s largest lender Sberbank has partnered with Integral last week to extend its eFX Liquidity distribution.
Other platforms also grapple with lower FX volumes
Following the boom in activity seen at major FX trading venues in March, the institutional ECNs were in a sea of red in April 2020, as currency trading volumes were down even further.
FXSpotStream’s trading venue, which is also a big player in the foreign exchange market, reported a 45 percent decline in average volumes last month. It reported $747 billion had changed hands during April 2020, compared to a record $1.37 trillion reported back in March 2020. Cboe’s institutional spot FX platform, which crossed the $1 trillion milestone in March amid coronavirus-driven volatility, disclosed a total trading volume of $643 billion, down -46 percent on a month-over-month basis.
This decline in trading volumes despite ongoing Cocona-led volatility could reflect a return of the “internationalization” trend that was seen in late 2019, where dealers and global banks preferred to offset risks of their client trades on their own books rather than passing them to multi-user platforms. A notable example was Citigroup, which cut the number of third-party platforms it gives currency quotes to 15 from 45 by the first quarter of 2020.
