It's been a while since the major FX multi-dealer platforms (MDPs) bowed to the inevitable and started hosting white-label-style single-dealer channels alongside their traditional services.

Since then, FX flow through banks' in-house single-dealer platforms (SDPs) has come to dwarf the flow through MDPs. For example, Barclays alone does about $80bn/day through BARX FX, which is almost double the entire average daily flow through FXall, Currenex or any of the other FX MDPs.

Will the same thing happen in Fixed Income? It's a very different market, of course, but almost every major bank has built, or is rapidly building, a fixed income SDP.

So it's interesting to read this (in SIN) from Billy Hult, President of TradeWeb Europe:

"In Europe, the single-dealer business is still a very viable way of executing trades. Trading protocols can develop more aggressively when it's a single dealer [system], because when it's non-competitive, there's more opportunity for the dealer to be creative with the trading methods offered to the client."

This, of course, is a trailer for TradeWeb's own single-dealer channel, TradeWeb PLUS, and similar functionality has been available through Bloomberg for a while.

But still... when the largest fixed income MDP says that SDPs are a good thing, and announces that it's rolling out its own single-dealer channel, it's definitely a sign of the times.