Digital Vega, provider of the award-winning Medusa multi-dealer FX Option platform, saw year-on-year growth of over 160% in 2014 with daily trading volumes breaking all previous records.
Mark Suter, Executive Chairman, says: “We were really pleased with last year’s progress and we remain very optimistic for 2015 given the continued pick up in volumes; we have always been at the forefront of what was a fledgling market, and based on last year’s strong performance, we have proven the model conclusively and have achieved critical mass both in terms of available liquidity and client adoption. We feel that this is further borne out by the results of the most recent Bank of England semi-annual FX survey (April 2014), which showed that for the first time, FX option flows over Multi-dealer platforms surpassed those over single dealer; we have now very clearly hit a major inflection point.”
In 2011, State Street Corporation and Deutsche Boerse acquired minority stakes in Digital Vega. Digital Vega leverages the complementary strengths of both entities to ensure rapid delivery of a range of market leading products and services.
Brendan Bradley, Chief Innovation Officer at Deutsche Boerse, says: “Despite unfavourable market conditions and continued delays in the implementation of the clearing obligation, we are pleased to see that Digital Vega is continuing to gain real traction with some very large and important clients. Given our ongoing interest in the FX derivatives markets, we feel that our early stage investment in Digital Vega has now been very much vindicated.”
Martine Bond, head of Trading and Clearing Solutions at State Street, says: “This dramatic increase in trading volumes comes as the industry ramps up electronic trading in non-deliverable forwards and options ahead of the global regulatory mandates that are expected to dictate trading and clearing of these instruments.”
The company already provides a range of FIX based execution and trade feed API’s and is now in the process of building a comprehensive pre and post trade allocation capability. It has also developed a sophisticated pre-trade order management and execution engine, which can be delivered via an intuitive GUI or FIX API. This application is already being used on a daily basis by the execution desk at AHL in London. “The development team at Digital Vega worked closely with us to deliver an elegant solution that combines tailored workflow management tools with the Medusa Option Trading Platform, enabling us to access multiple sources of liquidity from our counterparty banks” stated Murray Steel, COO at Man in Asia.
Nick Lukic, CEO of Digital Vega said: “As FX Option trading increasingly migrates to electronic trading channels, driven by a combination of greater transparency and cost savings on one hand and further regulatory pressure around best execution, users have started to focus on automating the entire trade lifecycle,” said “Larger hedge funds and asset managers tend to have complex workflow management requirements; executing, booking and confirming FX Option trades has historically been a very manual and labour-intensive process; we are well on the way to providing a seamless, fully automated solution.”
