ICAP brings BrokerTec and EBS under one roof
Gil Mandelzis will be chief executive of the combined businesses
ICAP is combining its EBS foreign exchange and BrokerTec fixed income electronic trading platforms into one business unit.
An ICAP spokesperson said the change was “an internal management reorganisation” and the platforms will remain separate for the foreseeable future.
In a statement ICAP said the combined business, which will be known as EBS-BrokerTec, will bring together BrokerTec’s client relationships and team with EBS’s technology and innovation pipeline “to deliver unique products and services to the industry and expand the addressable market of both platforms”.
The two platforms between them have more than 3,300 customers – with some overlap among larger trading institutions – in more than 50 countries and are used across a range of instruments including spot FX, US Treasuries, European government bonds and EU and US repo.
BrokerTec provides transparent, anonymous and orderly electronic fixed income trading covering US and European fixed income products, including US Treasuries, European Government Bonds and European Repo, for institutions, banks and non-bank professional trading organisations.
EBS is a primary core source of executable spot FX liquidity and independent benchmark pricing, providing access to spot FX, precious metals and NDF traders in established and emerging markets.
EBS, ICAP’s market-leading electronic FX business, announces today that it will be launching EBS Select, which will further enhance EBS’s multi-product offering. EBS’s multi-product offering currently includes EBS Market, its flagship anonymous central limit order book, and EBS Direct, its disclosed bilateral trading platform introduced a year ago
Early next year it will be enhanced with the addition of EBS Select, an “anonymous, segmented, bilateral liquidity pool” that will allow trading in a non-disclosed environment and deliver prices in a segregated liquidity pool. Users will trade using a unique trade identifier and “will be able to access the benefits of a bilateral relationship to achieve best execution while retaining anonymity”. More than 30 liquidity consumers and a number of liquidity providers are currently taking part in its beta roll out.
EBS Select will be available over customers’ existing EBS network and current access methods including the EBS Workstation, EBS Global Access and API infrastructure on EBS Ai, thus requiring no integration effort at all from existing EBS customers.
Users already have the option to access the EBS and BrokerTec platforms through i-Cross, a premium connectivity service from ICAP that provides API customers with a low-latency, high-speed connection to both platforms from a single data centre in the New York area, and to EBS in the London area and Tokyo. The i-Cross services provides a co-location solution for US Treasury trading via BrokerTec in Secaucus, New Jersey, and a proximity location solution for spot FX traders on EBS in North America, Europe and Japan.
Gil Mandelzis, current chief executive of EBS, will become chief executive of the new EBS-BrokerTec business. Mandelzis founded Traiana, a provider of post-trade and risk management services acquired by ICAP in 2007, and has headed EBS since March 2012. Seth Johnson will step down as the chief executive of BrokerTec but remains on ICAP’s global executive management group. Richard Kerschner, head of corporate development at EBS, has been appointed as the interim chief executive of BrokerTec. Michael Spencer, ICAP Group chief executive, will be chairman of EBS-BrokerTec.
