Russia's largest lender Sberbank has partnered with FX technology company Integral to extend its eFX Liquidity distribution.
The state-controlled lender’s liquidity is now available through Integral’s Open Currency Exchange (OCX), an FX ECN that connects to over 250 liquidity sources including banks, brokers and asset managers. The OTC venue supplies more than 3,000 market making streams in NY4, LD4, and TY3.
Sberbank joins a wide spectrum of FX market participants into a single integrated network of liquidity, where they can trade with each other. Clients of the OCX pay a monthly fee for access to the exchange, instead of per-trade fees. While it initially launched with a monthly subscription cost of $275, it was soon lowered to $2.75 per million to accommodate the trading volume of each user, rather than imposing an even charge to clients of all sizes.
“Sberbank handles a significant share of Russian FX market average daily turnover, with an internal liquidity pool turnover that exceeds 50% of the total public market in Russia. Our partnership with Integral will help facilitate enhanced liquidity for clients and will be a great addition to our FX distribution network,” said Andrey Shemetov, head of global markets at Sberbank.
Tending to surge in demand for Cryptocurrencies
“We welcome Sberbank to the OCX network. Extending their distribution over OCX will offer them direct and credit intermediated access to the largest and most diverse collection of FX liquidity consumers available,” Harpal Sandhu, CEO of Integral, added.
Since the deployment of the platform in 2015, the Silicon Valley-based company has been working on several enhancements which bring major changes for existing clients that use the OCX, and which could also attract new customers.
Integral has recently made a push into the FX prime brokerage space with the launch of TrueFX, a product developed in partnership with Jefferies FXPB to allow buyside firms to access the FX market at “a fraction of today’s trading costs.” The centrally-cleared venue caters to retail brokers, macro hedge funds, prime of primes, and also regional banks. It enables them to connect to all relevant liquidity venues through a single point of credit intermediation and technology integration.
Furthermore, Integral has been tending to the recent surge in demand for cryptocurrencies. The financial technology company initially integrated a handful of the world’s leading digital currencies into its OCX trading platform in late 2017.
