Breaking: FXCM Relaunches Institutional Offering Along With FXCMPro Website

FXCM has announced the relaunch of its FXCMPro.com website, building on its institutional business originally launched in 2004 and still growing.

The company offers firms access to prime brokerage services via FXCM Prime, a business that the company had announced it was getting involved with just a few years ago with regard to the prime brokerage space. The firm recently reported a surge in its institutional volumes, as both its prime brokerage and wholesale businesses are doing very well within the FXCMPro division.

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Ahead of the news, Finance Magnates reporters met with Brandon Mulvihill, Global Head of Sales for FXCM PRO, at the company's New York headquarters last Thursday to gather more information about the firm's institutional offering nearly a year after its website was taken offline following the SNB event.

Prime of prime and wholesale

The FXCM PRO division is driving the company’s institutional volumes, and those volumes consist of the division's prime of prime (PoP) and wholesale offering, whereas agency business conducted on FastMatch, which used to be the core product within PRO, has since been separated out into its own company as of last July.

PoP is an array of Liquidity providers that FXCM offers to firms along with the ability for FXCM to settle on their behalf (i.e. as their prime broker for the trades) when firms trade from among those designated liquidity sources.

For example, FXCM Prime currently offers direct access to Bloomberg Tradebook, Currenex, EBS Direct, EBS Markets, EBS Select, FXall, FastMatch, and Hotspot (BATS). Single bank access is available to BNP, Deutsche Bank, Citi, Goldman Sachs, Nomura, UBS, and RBS. A chart below depicts how institutional volumes have picked up since the FastMatch business was separated out from the reported results, resulting in what looks like a steep drop in July.

One year after SNB

The wholesale division offers an execution/liquidity relationship that caters to institutional clients including brokers via an omnibus account structure where - for example - firms that have A-book business will push those flows straight to their omnibus account at FXCM for the execution, and where they hold the required margin for the trades.

It’s been just over a year since the Swiss National Bank (SNB) wreaked havoc for FX brokers and nearly put FXCM out of business, causing it to make drastic changes to stay afloat including a last minute emergency loan from Leucadia, that helped it survive and that FXCM is focused on repaying.

Institutional redefined

Around that time last year after the SNB event, FXCM announced that it was planning to sell FastMatch (which was previously the main offering of FXCMPro), and other non-core assets, and had taken the FXCMPro website offline, yet, since then, the company's institutional offering shifted, with the two core products gaining momentum including the PoP and wholesale solution.

Fast-forward to today, and with FastMatch already a separate company since last July and one that FXCM only owns 35% of, we can look back at how FXCM is redefining their institutional offering again and adding emphasis to it with today's announcement.

Commenting in the company’s press release, Brandon Mulvihill, Global Head of Sales at FXCM Pro, said: “We are thrilled to unveil our clearing solution within our new website. FXCM Prime provides clients access to multiple trading venues, allowing for direct relationships between traders and liquidity management experts at each ECN provider. FXCM Prime fills the void of settling trades done across all platforms, with over 15 platforms available to clients. This agnostic approach is exactly what tier one prime brokers provide, and this is a rare service found in the secondary prime market.”

To put in perspective how the institutional volumes have grown when measuring from last July, after the discontinued operations were excluded from the company's report totals, the average monthly volume was just over $40 billion by end of last year, and including the year-to-date totals for 2016, that average has risen to $46 billion including the March total of $83 billion as reported early last week.