Following its acquisition by Singapore Exchange (SGX) earlier this year, London-headquartered BidFX has been growing its reach in the region and investing in R&D to strengthen its capabilities and security.
«The Asian NDF market is growing as a segment, and BidFX is well-positioned to capture a lions share of that market and that growth,» the company's Singapore-based CEO, Jean-Philippe Malé, said in an interview.
A subsidiary of Singapore Exchange (SGX), BidFX is a cloud-based FX technology solution provider for institutional investors to trade with their counterparties such as large investment banks, broker-dealers, or non-bank market makers.
«The nature of our service makes our platform quite relevant to the Asian FX market. We've built a customizable way for people to trade deliverable and non-deliverable currencies, and it's well-engineered for macro traders to take positions in these markets,» Malé told finews.asia.
Strengthening OTC Market
In July 2020, SGX, which already owned 20 percent of BidFX, paid $128 million to fully acquire the company as part of its bid to strengthen its bid to expand its FX capabilities beyond futures into the over-the-counter (OTC) foreign market.
«We've helped SGX implement a unique way to trade FX, not only OTC, but also to integrate the FX future liquidity in an OTC-like view on our trading platform. And they've helped us too – the synergies between the two teams are quite strong,» Malé said.
Investing in Back-End
«The demand to trade securely from anywhere is ever increasing, especially with many traders now working remotely,» Malé said about trends in the FX space, and said BidFX is growing its R&D team and investing in its back-end to cater to these demands.
«We're still going full-speed and building based on customer demand. The majority of our R&D investment next year is still going to be focused on our back-end infrastructure to increase security, our capacity for data centers worldwide, and grow the collection and use of data and analytics, and using that to drive automation of the order flow.»
Growing APAC Presence
The company is also present in Hong Kong and Australia. With its recent opening of a desk in Tokyo, BidFX now covers the main FX marketplaces in Asia.
«We've reached a state where we pretty much cover all the locations that we need to cover in order to provide a global FX service to our clients. We're going to continue to increase our presence and increase staffing in all these locations, at the same time we're growing or R&D team and continue investing in our product,» Malé said.
