Best liquidity aggregator: oneZero

 

oneZero’s Phil Weisberg discusses streamlining liquidity and its future impact on FX operations

Trades today move through the FX market faster than ever before. Spurred on by the Covid-19 pandemic-induced volatility, there has been an increase in the number of trades flowing through FX markets, which has invariably resulted in an uptick in the amount of data generated by the market. As such, many financial institutions and liquidity providers have come to find that the technology they had relied on for many years to manage their trade flows is beginning to strain and that the future wellbeing of their operations is impeded.

The evolution towards higher performance demands has proved to be a boon for a market-neutral technology provider such as oneZero, which already offered its clients – agency brokers, prime of primes, regional banks and FX brokers – liquidity aggregation technology solutions that could handle millions of transactions a day. Well anchored in the retail market for some time, the company made the conscious decision in 2019 to open up the technology to the institutional space.    

“We felt that this great technology that had been applied within the retail FX market would be of tremendous value to the institutional market,” explains Phil Weisberg, executive vice-president of strategic planning and partnerships at oneZero. “One of our strengths is that we are used to processing materially higher trade volumes because of our roots in retail FX, which required us to build solutions with higher levels of automation than were available in other institutional products serving the market. Our systems are naturally more efficient and performant because they were engineered to process orders of magnitude more transactions than competitive systems in the same unit of time.”

Institutions that found themselves with systems buckling under the strain of ever-increasing tickets took notice of oneZero’s technology offering. “Our systems benefit institutional clients where the increased market speed and higher automation requirements in the past few years has really played to our advantage”, says Weisberg. Those that took the leap not only began to appreciate the speed of their new technology setup, but soon realised the ease with which they could customise liquidity and pricing functions for a wide number of use cases.

Because oneZero’s liquidity aggregation technology captures, manages and analyses the data that flows through its Hub, its clients are able to gain a better understanding of the flows they deal with first hand. Unlike other aggregators, the data that flows through oneZero is recorded and analysed, and the results of that analysis are fed back in to improve the performance of the Hub. The data is ultimately used to segment the liquidity flow and build liquidity pools that best suit clients’ different customer segments. To this end, oneZero actively works with clients to analyse the data emanating from their liquidity flows and finds ways to make the system more efficient.

“We are a company that provides both liquidity aggregation and analytics, and it’s important to understand that there’s a natural feedback loop between the two,” says Weisberg. “Helping our clients to analyse the different types of flow they have is great, but that’s not enough. They then need to build liquidity pools and pricing functions that are unique for each type of flow.

“Whenever we’re creating an analytic for a client, we expect the ultimate outcome of the analytic to be a change in the configuration of their Hub. A lot of our clients, before coming to us, tripped up over the initial data collection and the lack of actionable outcomes.”

This is where the company’s focus on data plays to its strength. oneZero looks at liquidity aggregation in a holistic manner, where liquidity provision generates data, which in turn is used to provide better or more bespoke liquidity provision. For the company, it’s all about helping clients segment their flow and build a liquidity aggregation solution that provides a better outcome to all the different groups they service.

“Ultimately, we can’t thrive as a vendor unless we can prove to our clients that we’ve created value for them,” concludes Weisberg. “And obviously we have to put our clients in control of how that value gets distributed between their customers, partners in their distribution supply chain and themselves.”

oneZero was voted Best liquidity aggregator at the 2022 FX Markets e-FX Awards.

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