Another player has been quietly stepping in to fill the void left by big liquidity providers to the foreign exchange market. A start-up company run by two former Deutsche Bank executives has been filling the gap that big banks have left in the market in recent months due to prohibitive costs and inherent scandals that stirred the FX market.

XTX Markets is an electronic market maker company that delivers liquidity for foreign exchange, commodities, derivatives and equity markets already present on 22 ECNs and exchanges.

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Earlier this month, the company expanded its services to include the multi-dealer platform 360T. The electronic market maker has been providing liquidity flow to 360T since the 3rd of November.

TraderTools Partnership

Today the company announced that after partnering with TraderTools, XTX Markets has become a streaming liquidity provider to the integrated FX trading platform.

The firm will be led by former quant trader at Deutsche Bank, Alexander Gerko, who headed the quant research team at the institution until 2008 and the former Co-Head of Fixed Income at Deutsche Bank, Zar Amrolia, who recently joined.

XTX Markets, a leading electronic trading firm providing liquidity in the FX/Commodity/Equity/Derivatives markets, announced today that it has partnered with TraderTools as a streaming liquidity provider on its hosted FX trading platform.

Commenting on the agreement with TraderTools, the Head of e-FX sales at XTX Markets, Jan Strømme, said, “The partnership is an important step in our gaining access to select end-users via liquidity aggregators such as TraderTools. We will continue to look into partnerships with platform aggregators which complement our business model as we grow organically over the coming years.”

Post-SNB FX Liquidity Space Shifting

The electronic market maker branched away from London-based quantitative investment fund GSA Capital this summer and is already handling close to $40 billion per day.

The CEO of TraderTools, Adding Yaacov Heidingsfeld, elaborated, “Adding XTX Markets enhances both our alternative and relationship-based liquidity aggregation solution, the key elements to our core strategy.”

With the gap that has been growing larger after the Swiss National Bank (SNB) shock in the first quarter of this year, delivering liquidity to the foreign exchange markets has slowly become an unattractive business for big banks.

With the arrival of new technology-based start-ups such as XTX Markets, the void can be filled and the post-SNB liquidity situation on the foreign exchange market can shift away into a new direction.