Electronic Broking Services (EBS) is a wholesale

electronic trading platform In finance, an electronic trading platform also known as an online trading platform, is a computer software program that can be used to place orders for financial products over a network with a financial intermediary. Various financial products ...

used to trade on the foreign exchange market (FX) with market-making

bank A bank is a financial institution that accepts deposits from the public and creates a demand deposit while simultaneously making loans. Lending activities can be directly performed by the bank or indirectly through capital markets. Because ...

s. It was originally created as a partnership by large banks and then became part of CME Group.

History

EBS was created by a partnership of large foreign exchange (FX) market making

s in 1990 to challenge

Reuters Reuters ( ) is a news agency owned by Thomson Reuters Corporation. It employs around 2,500 journalists and 600 photojournalists in about 200 locations worldwide. Reuters is one of the largest news agencies in the world. The agency was esta ...

' threatened

monopoly A monopoly (from Greek el, μόνος, mónos, single, alone, label=none and el, πωλεῖν, pōleîn, to sell, label=none), as described by Irving Fisher, is a market with the "absence of competition", creating a situation where a speci ...

in interbank spot foreign exchange and provide effective competition. By 2007, approximately US$164 billion in

spot Spot or SPOT may refer to: Places * Spot, North Carolina, a community in the United States * The Spot, New South Wales, a locality in Sydney, Australia * South Pole Traverse, sometimes called the South Pole Overland Traverse People * Spot (prod ...

foreign exchange transactions were traded every day over EBS's central limit order book, EBS Market. EBS's closest competitor is

Refinitiv Refinitiv is an American-British global provider of financial market data and infrastructure. The company was founded in 2018. It is a subsidiary of London Stock Exchange Group after a US$27 billion sale from previous owners Blackstone Group LP ...

FXall. The decision by an FX trader whether to use EBS or FXall is driven largely by

currency pair A currency pair is the dyadic quotation of the relative value of a currency unit against the unit of another currency in the foreign exchange market. The currency that is used as the reference is called the counter currency, quote currency, or ...

. In practice, EBS is the primary

trading venue An exchange, bourse (), trading exchange or trading venue is an organized market where (especially) tradable securities, commodities, foreign exchange, futures, and options contracts are bought and sold. History 12th century: Brokers on t ...

for EUR/USD, USD/JPY, EUR/JPY, USD/CHF, EUR/CHF and USD/CNH, and FXall is the primary trading venue for commonwealth (AUD/USD, NZD/USD, USD/CAD) and emerging market currency pairs. EBS initiated e-trading in spot precious metals, spanning spot gold, silver, platinum and palladium, and remains the leading electronic broker in spot gold and silver through the Loco London Market. They were the first organisation to facilitate orderly black box or algorithmic trading in spot FX, through an application programming interface (API). By 2007 this accounted for 60% of all EBS flow. In addition to spot FX and Precious Metals, EBS has expanded trading products through its venues to include NDFs, forwards and FX options. It has also increased the range of trading style to include RFQ and streaming in disclosed and non-disclosed environments. EBS was acquired by ICAP, the world's largest

inter-dealer broker An Inter-dealer broker (IDB) is specialist financial intermediary that facilitates transactions between broker-dealers, dealer banks and other financial institutions rather than private individuals.IDBsact as intermediaries in the financial mark ...

, in June 2006. In 2014, EBS merged with BrokerTec—a service provider in the fixed income markets—to form EBS BrokerTec. BrokerTec offers trading technology for many US and European fixed income products including US Treasuries, European Government Bonds and European Repo. In 2017, EBS BrokerTec was renamed to NEX Markets and the name EBS BrokerTec ceased to exist. The names of the trading platforms, EBS and BrokerTec, remained. In 2018, NEX Markets was acquired by CME Group.{{Cite web, last=Browne, first=Ryan, date=2018-03-29, title=CME Group reaches deal to acquire NEX for $5.5 billion, url=https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/29/cme-group-deal-to-buy-nex-for-5-point-5-billion.html, access-date=2020-08-20, website=CNBC, language=en

Structure

Products of the company include: *EBS Spot (electronic FX spot broking) *EBS Spot Ai (application program interface (API) between the customer's trading system and the EBS Spot market) *EBS Prime (access for the interbank and professional trading communities to the best EBS Spot prices from an EBS Prime bank) *EBS Metals (electronic spot broking for the precious metals market) *EBS NDFs (electronic spot broking for non-deliverable FX pairs) *EBS Live (live streaming prices delivered with minimum latency direct from EBS to the customer's market data distribution platform) *EBS Ticker (third-party system distribution of EBS Spot prices) *EBS Rates (desktop view of EBS Spot prices, available through the Thomson Reuters Eikon and 3000xtra desktop as well as the

Bloomberg Terminal The Bloomberg Terminal is a computer software system provided by the financial data vendor Bloomberg L.P. that enables professionals in the financial service sector and other industries to access Bloomberg Professional Services through which u ...

service) *EBS Data Mine (unique and certified historical data from 1997 onwards)

References

Financial services companies established in 1990 Financial services companies of the United States Commodity exchanges in the United States Electronic trading platforms 2006 mergers and acquisitions American companies established in 1990

History

Structure

See also

References