The newly enriched FX data service from Swift uses real transactions to measure activity share and competitive position on an instrument-by-instrument basis.
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Getting to the heart of the problem
FX market liquidity providers have traditionally relied on surveys to find out how effectively they are operating. However, a common challenge with this approach is getting reliable and up-to-date facts about FX transactions that have already occurred.
If you are running an FX business you want to know how well you are performing in each instrument, in each geography and among each client group, as well as benchmark against your peers. Ideally, you should be able to do this benchmarking on the basis of the largest, deepest and most recent set of transactional data as frequently as possible – because your relative position changes all the time.
The Swift data set is truly a representative sample of global activity in the FX markets.
The best-known survey currently on the market is the triennial survey of foreign exchange and OTC derivatives trading conducted by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). There are also surveys based on underlying trade data. Settled transactions are collected from asset managers and corporates, broken down in a variety of ways, and accompanied by qualitative feedback on service levels.
Another major source of FX market data is provided by the CLS. This covers the FX spot, swap and outright forward markets in aggregate and at a currency pair level for all trade data for the supported 18 currencies submitted in operation of their settlement and aggregation services.
Solutions of this kind help banks understand whether or not their customers appreciate what they do. It also provides them with useful ammunition for marketing and communications. However, they fall short in that they cover only a fraction of the market. The data is collected once and is always out-of-date and backward-looking.
Swift FX Performance Insights – meeting the challenge
To enable FX liquidity providers to understand their competitive position more clearly, Swift has launched an enhanced version of our FX Performance Insights (FX-PI) service.
FX-PI is not based on a survey, but on the MT 300 FX confirmation messages sent directly over Swift. This data enables firms to gauge their share of the market in terms of:
- Clients (banks, broker-dealers, central banks, asset managers, corporates)
- Currency pairs (there are more than 900) and
- Transaction volumes (in a market with rising volumes, some will grow their market share faster than others).
Above all, it allows FX providers to measure their activity share on Swift by instrument (spot, forwards and swaps).
Several million FX messages are carried by Swift every day between up to 10,000 users. One in five of these is a real money end-using corporate or asset manager.
The full picture
For the first time it is now possible for Swift to show the relative percentage breakdown of instrument type for the global FX market. The following tables compare the breakdown estimated by the BIS for the market in April 2016, to what is now available from Swift’s own metrics, and to those publicly published by CLS in their monthly market reports.
| FX Global Market by Instrument | BIS triannual survey (04/2016) | CLS 10/2018¹ | Swift 10/2018 | Combined Swift & CLS 10/2018 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FX forwards & non-deliverable forwards | 13% | 5% | 17% | 11% |
| FX spot | 33% | 28% | 37% | 32% |
| FX swaps | 47% | 68% | 41% | 54% |
| FX options / other | 5% | N/A | 6% | 3% |
It is interesting to note that the combined Swift and CLS percentage share by instrument correlates closely to the shares published by BIS back in 2016. Swift estimates that this combined share equates to approximately two thirds of the daily traded value of the entire global FX marketplace.
In addition, we can now show the underlying net number of trade transactions behind each instrument type as shown in the table below.
| FX Global Market by Instrument |
Swift 08/2018 |
Percent of Swift Total |
|---|---|---|
| FX forwards & non-deliverable forwards | 60 | 17% |
| FX spot | 268 | 76% |
| FX swaps | 22 | 6% |
| FX options / other | 4 | 1% |
| Total Swift 08/2018 | 354 | 100% |
How can I access the data?
At present, the FX-PI reports are available in PDF or CSV form only, delivered by secure email on a monthly basis.
The reports include indications of areas of relative weakness and strength, giving users reliable information to make management decisions about which currencies, countries, regions and instruments they need to reinforce or leave alone.
A select number of firms are currently working with Swift under a Design Partner approach to identify and maximise the value in this dataset. The enhanced FX-PI service will be available early next year, and from the middle of next year users will also be able to access and download the enhanced FX data information online via the Swift Watch Banking Analytics Premium Solution.
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¹ CLS Analytics: Monthly Market Report - October 2018 available via the CLS website
² Adjusted net figures mean that all total numbers of confirmations are first divided by two as normally there is an exchange of confirmations by two parties for each trade, and then Swaps and Non-Delivery Forwards are further divided by two to take account of just the closing leg of these types of instruments.
