Barclays Plc will start a foreign exchange trading and pricing engine in Singapore in mid-2021, marking the British lender’s fourth electronic currency trading hub globally.
Barclays will build out a local version of the trading system, known as BARX, adding to hubs in New York, London and Tokyo, the London-based bank said in a statement on Wednesday.
“FX is an important growth area for the firm globally and critically this takes us from a 3-hub model to a 4-hub model,” James Hassett, co-head of global emerging markets and G10 Linear FX, said in the statement. Hassett, also head of flow macro trading for Asia, relocated to Singapore from London in August.
Barclays joins global banks such as Citigroup Inc., UBS Group AG and JPMorgan Chase & Co. in setting up electronic forex systems in Singapore as the island state aspires to be Asia’s biggest foreign-exchange currency center.
The pricing and trading engines allow investors to reduce the time lag from routing trades elsewhere and last year helped Singapore take market share from Japan, while competing against Hong Kong that’s at the forefront of the yuan market.
