BGC PARTNERS COMPLETES FIRST FULLY ELECTRONIC AUSTRALIAN DOLLAR INTEREST RATE SWAP TRANSACTION ON BGC TRADER
BGC Also Conducts First Fully Electronic Australian Bills/Libor Basis Trade
Sydney, 14 February 2011 – BGC Partners, Inc. (Nasdaq: BGCP) (“BGC”), a leading global intermediary to the wholesale financial markets, announces its first fully electronic Australian Dollar Interest Rate Swap (IRS) trade using BGC’s award-winning Volume Match tool on the BGC™ Trader platform.
Volume Match is integrated into BGC’s proprietary platform, BGC Trader and, at pre-set times during the day, offers customers auction-style electronic trading across a wide range of asset classes including credit default swaps, foreign exchange options and interest rate swaps.
Philip Norton, Executive Managing Director and Global Head of e-Commerce, said: “Over the past two years, we have more than tripled the number of desks that offer fully e-broking. Over a third of BGC’s approximately 200 products can now be traded electronically on BGC Trader and the flexibility of BGC’s proprietary platform enables the rapid and seamless addition of further fully electronic products. This significant increase in fully electronic trading on our platform over the past year reflects our customers’ appetite for a flexible and robust electronic trading platform for derivatives.”
Deane Gunson, Managing Director Australia, said: “We are very pleased to continue the roll-out of Volume Match in the Asia Pacific region, following the launch of fully electronic Singapore dollar interest rate swaps in October. The addition of Australian dollar IRS and Bills/Libor basis reflect the growing demand for electronic trading across new products in the region.”
Anthony Herbert, head of Australia and New Zealand Interest Rate Swap, added: “Our customers look to us to provide liquidity in key markets. By offering the option of fully electronic trading for swaps products, in addition to our strong existing voice franchise, we are giving our customers more efficient price discovery and greater flexibility.”
About BGC™ Trader
BGC Trader is BGC’s proprietary multi-asset, integrated voice and electronic price execution platform for the inter-bank and broker community. Introduced through extensive customer feedback, BGC Trader offers a feature-filled, flexible and easy to use front-end. Users benefit from thin-client technology, which allows improved delivery with managed product updates and enhancements, speed, availability and resilience.
BGC Trader is fully integrated with a choice of either voice or electronic access to support multiple products including:
• Fixed income
• European corporate cash
• FX Options
• Credit default swaps
• i-Traxx
BGC’s platform is regulated as a multilateral trading facility (MTF) by the FSA and adheres to the EU’s Markets in Financial Instruments Directive.
About BGC™ Volume Match
Volume Match is an application within the BGC Trader platform. Volume Match is an anonymous auction-style trading system, which provides customers with efficient price discovery, order management and execution in credit and FX derivative products. It is run multiple times per day for multiple products depending on market demand:
• At specific times and set price levels the market can execute trades anonymously
• Volume Match runs for approximately 5 minutes, several times per day
• At the conclusion of the Volume Match, only those participating will be aware of their transactions
• All unfilled interest remains undisclosed to the marketplace – which aims to remove execution risk
In some markets Volume Match offers an additional price discovery tool allowing traders themselves to post two-way prices. With this additional step, the mid-price is established by the market rather than being inputted by the broker. This offers significantly increased price transparency and efficiency of execution in certain markets.
Volume Match is deployed using Citrix, and is hosted by BGC.