EBS BrokerTec announced plans to redesign its FX market data service, EBS Live, and will move to streaming real-time market data later this summer.
iCAP’s EBS brokerTec’s EBS Live Ultra feed aims to deliver improved price discovery and transparency for market reference data.
This is a meaningful development for customers who will now be able to receive significantly more granular data and substantially further enhanced price discovery on the EBS Market platform. EBS is already the markets reference point for the worlds most liquid currencies, but by delivering continuous data we will remove the need for low latency connectivity to respond to time sliced data, which tends to create race conditions amongst participants, said Gil Mandelzis, CEO of EBS BrokerTec. This in turn this will improve the overall ecology of the platform.
According to a press statement, the new service is in response to demand and consultation with customers who continue to work with EBS because of its deep liquidity and firm pricing for certainty of execution.
Liam Hudson, global head of FX eCommerce, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, supports the new upgraded platform. With EBS moving to streaming data, both transparency and price discovery will significantly improve on the platform. In general, streaming market data only stands to benefit the foreign exchange markets by improving transparency and in turn, the quality of data used to price client trades, said Hudson.
Alex Gerko, Co-CEO of XTX markets, echoes this sentiment. Streaming market data is definitely a benefit to the market ecology, especially for the primary venues. It creates and promotes greater price transparency which negates the predatory behaviour of some market participants as it allows the broader market to have access to, and quickly reference, real-time pricing data, said Gerko.
By providing continuous data, EBS BrokerTec expects market practices such as Last Look to be less prevalent in the market. With pricing more clearly and reliably available, in real time, theres less likely to be the need, or justification to review client execution on last look venues. This will have a positive effect on the markets ability to rely on firm venues for execution purposes, said Mandelzis.
The EBS Live Ultra feed will be delivered over multicast via what EBS BrokerTec calls a new binary protocol, to ensure simultaneous efficient delivery, and will be available late summer.
