The PTC - defined as the non banking professional FX traders who trade high frequency in FX by assuming risk, such as Hedge Funds, CTAs and FCMs - has been looking to its banks and to EBS to facilitate this access.

Together with the EBS Prime Banks, EBS will enter a detailed research and development phase in December 2004 for a product to provide this non-bank professional trading community access to the award-winning EBS Spot system for US and UK funds. Once the research and development phase is completed and the project is ready for full commercial launch, this will become one of the most significant recent developments in the FX trading market globally.

During the pilot phase, EBS will be working with the five current EBS Prime Banks - Barclays Capital, Deutsche, HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, Royal Bank of Scotland, together with a number of new EBS Prime Banks who are in the process of coming on board. The EBS Prime Banks will work with selected PTC customers (Hedge Funds, CTAs and FCMs) to test the offering and gauge the appetite for the service among the global investment management community.

Participation in the true FX market on EBS Spot would provide the PTC customers with access to increased liquidity together with the benefits of electronic trading on EBS - speed, best rates, reporting, audit trail etc. - provided through the EBS Prime Banks.

Jack Jeffery, Chief Executive Officer, EBS said: "FX remains a highly liquid, increasingly non-cyclical asset class and there is a significant appetite in the professional trading community for access to the optimum pricing and liquidity in this market.

"We have a legacy of innovation and enabling access to a global trading community and orderly market in FX. Our research and development effort with EBS Prime Banks and the professional trading community is an exciting step for our business."

He added: "By giving our EBS Prime Customers the appropriate tools to provide access to their PTC customers, we believe that EBS will continue to facilitate an orderly market which will benefit the market as a whole."

EBS is committed to enhancing orderly access to the global FX market and recently launched EBS Prime, a service designed to enable smaller and regional banks to join the EBS Spot trading community by using the credit of an EBS Prime Bank.

Each day 2,000 traders on 750 floors globally use the EBS Spot interbank dealing system to trade an average of USD 100 billion a day in spot foreign exchange transactions and 500,000 ozs in gold and 4 million ozs in silver, in more than 38 countries.

The continued increase in volume of deals transacted daily through EBS Spot creates unparalleled liquidity and the design of the system allows users to view all their currency pairs on the same screen.