J.P. Morgan to set up electronic FX trading and pricing engine

It will launch in early 2020.

J.P. Morgan will establish an electronic FX trading and pricing engine in Singapore as it seeks to speed up trade executions for clients, according to a media release.

Scheduled to launch in early 2020, the new trading engine marks the bank's fourth electronic FX trading infrastructure globally, adding to its existing platforms in New York, London and Tokyo.

"With electronic FX trading set to grow in the region, Singapore will benefit from the flows and we see this initiative consolidating Singapore’s position as Asia’s leading FX trading center,” Sudhanshu Sanadhya, head of Asia currencies and emerging markets trading, J.P. Morgan said in a statement.

UBS and Citigroup earlier set up FX pricing engines in the city as the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) intensifies efforts to meet the rapid growth in FX trading. MAS is aiming to bring in six to eight more big players in a bid to capture a bigger slice of the world's US$5.1t-a-day forex market, according to a report from Bloomberg.

"With the growth in Asia’s FX trading needs and increasing demand for more efficient price discovery in the Asian time-zone, regional market participants will benefit from better connectivity and latency as well as enhanced pricing and trade execution in the Singapore FX electronic trading ecosystem,” Gillian Tan, Executive Director, Financial Markets Development Department, MAS said in a statement.

Although Singapore is already Asia’s biggest forex trading center by volume, the city is still a long way behind the U.K. and U.S. where investors exchange US$2.41t and US$1.27t respectively each day, Bloomberg said citing data from Bank of International Settlements (BIS).