EBS BrokerTec, ICAP's market-leading electronic foreign exchange (FX) and fixed income business, is redesigning its premium FX market data service, EBS Live, and will move to streaming real-time market data.
The ‘EBS Live Ultra’ feed will provide significantly improved price discovery and transparency, enhancing EBS BrokerTec’s status as the premier venue for market reference data in its core pairs.
Commenting on the new service, Gil Mandelzis, CEO EBS BrokerTec, says: “This is a meaningful development for customers who will now be able to receive significantly more granular data and substantially further enhanced price discovery on the EBS Market platform. EBS is already the market’s reference point for the world’s most liquid currencies, but by delivering continuous data we will remove the need for low latency connectivity to respond to time sliced data, which tends to create race conditions amongst participants. This in turn will improve the overall ecology of the platform.”
The new service is in response to demand and consultation with customers who continue to work with EBS because of its deep liquidity and firm pricing for certainty of execution.
Liam Hudson, Global Head of FX eCommerce, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, says: “With EBS moving to streaming data, both transparency and price discovery will significantly improve on the platform. In general, streaming market data only stands to benefit the foreign exchange markets by improving transparency and in turn, the quality of data used to price client trades.”
Alex Gerko, Co-CEO, XTX markets, says: “Streaming market data is definitely a benefit to the market ecology, especially for the primary venues. It creates and promotes greater price transparency which negates the predatory behaviour of some market participants as it allows the broader market to have access to, and quickly reference, real-time pricing data.”
By providing continuous data, EBS BrokerTec expects market practices such as Last Look to be less prevalent in the market. Says Mr Mandelzis: “With pricing more clearly and reliably available, in real time, there’s less likely to be the need, or justification to review client execution on last look venues. This will have a positive effect on the market’s ability to rely on firm venues for execution purposes.”
The EBS Live Ultra feed will be delivered over multicast via a new binary protocol, to ensure simultaneous efficient delivery, available late summer.
