The bank joins other major FX participants in serving strong institutional FX flows in Asia, as the republic aims to boost its role as the global FX price discovery and liquidity hub in the Asian time zone.

UOB will launch an electronic foreign exchange (FX) pricing and trading engine in Singapore, which will enable clients to tap the available market liquidity with greater efficiency, in the second quarter of 2021, the bank announced on Monday in a statement.

The FX trading engine will take advantage of reduced latency via co-location connectivity to improve price discovery and to enhance pricing capability. Leslie Foo, UOB's head of group global markets, said the bank is looking forward to playing a «major role» in Singapore’s fast-growing FX e-trading ecosystem.

FX Trading Hub

Under the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s (MAS) FX Trading Hub strategy, which aims to cement Singapore as the top FX trading center in Asia Pacific, firms like BarclaysJ.P. MorganStandard CharteredUBSCitiBNP Paribas, Euronext, Jump Trading and XTX Markets have built their own regional trading infrastructure in the city-state.

«It remains a key priority for MAS to further broaden and deepen our FX market, and we welcome more buy-side participants to join the fast-growing FX e-trading ecosystem in Singapore,» Lim Cheng Khai, MAS executive director financial markets development, said in the announcement.