Standard Bank South Africa (SBSA) deploys TradAir as part of strategic vision to dominate Dollar Rand (USD.ZAR) market-making globally, and create regional market-making specialists across Africa.
Standard Bank South Africa (SBSA) are a very active, and fully committed two-way market-maker in Dollar Rand (USD.ZAR), across all primary and the majority of secondary venues on a global basis. Their strategic goal is to be the dominant market-making bank in Rand and other African currencies, on a global basis.
As the largest bank in Africa, SBSA services a large and diverse client base, and are the leading provider of FX services in the continent, resulting in large volumes of client flows, both in Rand and other African regional currencies as well as in G10 majors. SBSA services the FX needs of their commercial, corporate and institutional clients through a number of tailored online FX trading channels, with resultant flows either internalised or hedged in the market.
SBSAs strategic vision, is for their FX market-making to evolve, whereby primary market-making capabilities will reside with regional specialists, whose expertise is backed by strong local knowledge and client flows in their particular currency pairs, with world class eFX technology, connecting the specialists, enabling them to offer clients a truly world class FX service.
Speaking about their decision to select TradAir’s e-FX platform, Tim Hutchinson, Head of eFX trading at SBSA said;
“TradAir are a strategic platform for the SBSA group, and their customisable rate-engine and hedging solutions enable us to improve our dollar rand market-making capabilities.
We plan to deploy TradAir to all 18 of our regional dealing centres across Africa, enabling each local operation to market-make in the core currencies. As a result, our clients will benefit from more competitive and robust pricing, whilst our auto-hedging strategies, means our risk management is now more effective.
In addition, leveraging TradAir’s real-time trade analytics engine enables us to gain deep insight into the trading behaviour of clients across all execution channels, and the relative performance of our liquidity providers. TradAir brings value both in terms of technology, and as a market expert partner.”
Commenting on SBSA’s implementation of TradAir’s e-FX platform,
Illit Geller, TradAir CEO commented;
“We have an excellent relationship with SBSA, and have worked closely with Tim and his highly experienced team of trading, technology and operations professionals to implement a solution, that supports their strategic global market-making ambitions. This is a great example of how TradAir can service the needs of large regional banks, enabling them to strengthen their marketmaking capabilities and grow their client franchise, in an effective risk managed and profitable way.”
Using the enhanced liquidity and flexibility of the TradAir rate-engine, SBSA traders are now able to create tailored pricing streams for particular clients and client groups, which has resulted in increased client flows.
The configurable auto-hedging modules enable traders to implement rules-based hedging strategies to manage client flows. Hedging rules are defined at group, or in the case of aggressive clients that generate ‘toxic’ flows, on an individual client basis, providing more effective risk management coverage across all client flows.
With TradAir NOW, SBSA gains deep insight into the trading behaviour of clients, and the pricing characteristics of liquidity providers, enabling them to more effectively price clients, and profitably hedge resulting flows.