Goldman Sachs joins peers with launch of forex pricing engine in Singapore

Singapore

GOLDMAN Sachs on Tuesday announced that it will build an electronic foreign exchange (FX) pricing engine in Singapore to deliver low-latency execution for its clients.

Its move follows those of other global banks to launch FX trading and pricing engines in Singapore.

They include Barclays, JPMorgan Chase & Co, BNP Paribas, Citigroup, UBS and Standard Chartered.

This comes as part of the Monetary Authority of Singapore's (MAS) strategic push to develop Singapore into a global price discovery and liquidity centre for FX during Asian trading hours, said Goldman Sachs in a statement.

The first clients are scheduled to be live in the first quarter of 2021 across deliverable and non-deliverable currencies.

This will be the fourth FX pricing engine that the US-based investment bank supports globally, the others being in London, Tokyo and New York.

"We continue to actively develop our presence in Singapore, and have seen consistent growth of our franchise here over a number of years in both FX and broader global markets," said EG Morse, chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs in Singapore.

Gillian Tan, MAS executive director at the financial markets development department, said: "We welcome this partnership with Goldman Sachs, which is aligned with our strategy to grow a critical mass of players and liquidity for Asia-Pacific buy-side players to gain efficient pricing and execution, and strengthen Singapore's standing as a global FX centre."

Earlier this month, Barclays separately announced that it will be launching its new FX trading and pricing engine in Singapore in mid-2021, under the London-headquartered bank's push to strengthen its FX presence in the Asia-Pacific.

In a 2019 survey on FX trading conducted by the Bank for international Settlements, Singapore was placed as the third-largest FX trading centre in the world.

Its average daily FX trading volume was up 22 per cent from 2016 to US$633 billion in April 2019; the US$633 billion represented 7.6 per cent of global FX turnover.

Britain topped the list, followed by the United States.