The financial technology provider oneZero has announced plans to release several major upgrades to its trading platforms in 2024. The improvements will give clients real-time visibility into their market exposure and portfolios to help optimize profitability amid shifting conditions.

According to the company's CEO, Andrew Ralich, this is one of the four main themes of next year's development. Alongside this, he mentioned the development of artificial intelligence (AI) tools for foreign exchange data, the need to extract value from flow, and the transition in North American settlement to a T+1 basis.

oneZero Announces Major Platform Upgrades for 2024

"Next year, we will roll out a series of product enhancements that give our clients a live view of their positions across assets," said Ralich. "These new tools will be vital as firms continue adopting strategies to boost performance regardless of market volatility or changes in liquidity."

oneZero will focus its 2024 development roadmap on enhancing profit and loss tracking functionality through integrated analytics. The move aligns with the growing demand among regional banks, brokers, and other trading institutions to leverage advanced data and algorithms alongside existing systems.

"Technology is key to bank and broker outperformance nowadays," Ralich explained. "By delivering intelligent solutions tailored to our clients' needs, we empower them to increase revenue through superior pricing, risk management and actionable insights."

Additionally, oneZero plans to expand its use of AI to spot inefficiencies and opportunities in immense data sets. The company currently deploys AI for transaction analysis, hedging recommendations, and loss avoidance tasks.

These are further changes following the announcement in November of the merger of institutional and retail teams and changes in leadership. Earlier, oneZero also changed its sales team by hiring a new head. In a separate move, after seven years, the Director of Business Development left the company.

Extracting Value from Flow

In addition to new products, the CEO of OneZero stressed the need for the FX trading community to increase the value extracted from flow in 2024.

"We will be talking to clients in the coming months about systematic hedging, and we have also developed a product to help operate a proprietary trading business alongside a brokerage," Ralich said.

oneZero offers various AI-powered tools, like Maker Pool Replay, to assist clients in evaluating methods to derive more value from flow next year. Additionally, introducing oneZero's Portfolios system will give real-time insight into the profit and loss impact of different risk strategies.

With the platform improvements slated for next year, oneZero aims to equip clients to extract maximum value from market flows and operate seamlessly during vital trading hours. The news comes as the industry prepares for major US settlement changes that could strain liquidity in 2024.

2024 Will Bring Changes in FX Liquidity Conditions

The change will take place at the end of May 2024 and, while it primarily concerns the stock and bond market, it will also directly impact FX traders. The majority of transactions in this market will continue to settle on a T+2 basis. This will pose new challenges for holders of US stocks and bonds outside the United States who will need to settle their transactions on a timely basis and manage the resulting FX exposure.

“After meeting clients around the world, I worry that the shift to T+1 securities settlement could create FX market strains next year if traders don’t take steps now to ensure they have the right technology solutions in place,” Ralich explained.

There will be a mismatch. Securities will settle faster, but FX trades related to those securities would still be on a T+2 basis. This means anyone outside the US needing to settle US stock or bond transactions will have an extra day of currency risk before their FX hedge settles. As Ralich noted, it will be logical for them to hedge as late as possible, right before the US market closes.

The problem is that FX liquidity tends to be poor towards the US closing. So, there could be major strains in getting timely FX hedges in place to align with the new T+1 stock and bond settlement timeline.