LEADER
at RBS. “In today’s marketplace, banks can no longer get away with just being on the clients’ desktops. You have to be embedded into their trading systems.”
“We are a highly rated FX options business through our RBS heritage and in the last few years we invested in technology for high frequency market-making and scored very well on the anonymous trading platforms and that is what drives the development of our electronic platform,” says Mount. “Part of what we’re trying to do is emphasise our expertise in the market and make the electronic platform becomes a conduit and delivery mechanism for the client. As the client demand grows it is then our obligation to put these pieces together in a single experience. We do not want to separate the traditional FX sales team from the e-commerce team but have a single FX trading service.”
As with other platform providers, RBS is also having to balance the idea of a standardised and integrated multi- asset platform with the ability to provide personalised and customised features where demanded. Mount says that the RBS Agile product is an example of such an
approach in that it designs custom made algorithms for clients. “We are trying to understand our clients’ execution process and mimicking that on their behalf to take some of the emotion out of their execution. We operate in these FX markets on a daily basis and we are creating the tools that will enable them to access the liquidity that we generate on a daily basis.”
Catering for different client sectors
Having both corporate and institutional clients presents a challenge in that the two sectors generally have different trading motivations and strategies and, says Mount, RBS works closely
with its sales teams to understand each client and then closely with its IT team to ensure that new products can be developed as quickly as possible. “Te technology and the relationship feed into each other. A product like RBS Agile is not just a portal to our in-house tools. It is a flexible development environment with a very quick release schedule so that we are able to respond to any changing needs.”
But how does RBS ensure that it is not spending all of its time developing a new product for each client? “We’ve focused on separating the custom algorithm side from the core structure of the platform. All of these algorithms are a variation on a theme and we offer clients our research and analytics so that they can essentially design their own algorithms. We also offer them backtesting and transaction costs analysis and smart order routing as well as offering them additional services like options replication and variance swaps. And we can do all of this through the same interface.”
Pay back Ed Mount
“In today’s marketplace, banks can no longer get away with just being on the clients’ desktops. You have to be embedded into their trading systems.”
26 | april 2012 e-FOREX
For the banks, the effort put into understanding the client experience and personalising their platforms is presumably paid back by having clients come to them directly rather than going via a multi-bank portal. “It is important for banks like us that have a big presence on the multi-bank portals to recognise that one size does not fit all,” says Mount. “All of our clients want good execution but we want to give them the same experience that we have as risk managers and traders ourselves. Prices in FX have become commoditised but the expertise we have in the markets is what we think makes the difference and allows us to have a client relationship rather than just a product,” he concludes.
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