Achievement award: Jeff Feig

In 1989, a young Canadian graduate from the University of Western Ontario walked onto Citi's trading floor in Toronto and knew immediately that he wanted to pursue a career in sales and trading. Fifteen years later, in 2004, having climbed the ladder from junior forwards trader to head of European FX, Jeff Feig was appointed to head G-10 FX at Citi globally.

During nine years in that role, Feig is widely acknowledged to have transformed and re-energised Citi's FX franchise, placing innovative technology at its core and becoming one of the most respected sell-side leaders in the global FX industry. He wins this year's e-FX achievement award for the contribution he has made not just to Citi but also to the broader industry as a long-serving member and, since 2010, chair of the FX Committee of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

"Internally, Jeff is loved by his team and he has been a role model for many at Citi," observes one industry veteran. "Externally he has been feared for his vision of moving the market to a more efficient and electronic playing field. He has brought out the best in the competition, driving more volumes, more thoughtful research, and lifting the profile of FX to become a legitimate asset class in the eyes of many investors."

Right from his earliest days at Citi, it was Feig's eye for opportunities in technology that set him aside from his peers. After a short stint on the bond desk in Toronto, he was moved to the FX forwards desk and was shocked at the arcane processing tools in use, which amounted to handwritten tickets manually inputted to the position-keeper's desk, from where they would be sent to the back office.

Feig's first investment in technology was to buy a copy of Excel and programme a simple position-keeping system for the desk, with its own pricing models. Within a short time, everyone on the desk was using the system and, when he moved to New York as a forwards trader in 1993, he was allocated a dedicated group of technologists to expand it into a fully industrialised system. It became the backbone of Citi's forwards business for 15 years, until it was finally retired in 2009.

"I'm not a programmer, but I have always been comfortable thinking about how to use technology to gain competitive advantage. When I got to Citi in Toronto, I really felt that desk was lagging behind and there were a lot of ways to use technology to enhance what we were doing," recalls Feig.

Fast-forward to today, and technology remains at the centre of Feig's remit as he retains an almost obsessive compulsion to ensure the bank's systems are as innovative and user-friendly as possible. In recognition of that, he was given additional responsibility earlier this year to develop Citi's electronic trading efforts across asset classes, in addition to his existing role.

While the process of developing and launching a new system in 2013 is light years away from what it was in 1989 – with far more focus today on latency, stability and infrastructure – Feig remains focused on ensuring systems are, in his own words, "cool". An early aficionado of Apple (a corporate client to whom he always paid deliberately excessive attention relative to the size of its business), Feig has modelled Citi's technology with the same approach, seeking to make the flagship Velocity platform more intuitive and user-friendly than its competitors.

"Jeff lives to innovate – he pushed Citi to invest in technology when others were retrenching, and Velocity broke into a field that most people thought was already sewn up by Autobahn and Barx. His eye for detail, and the need for the end-consumer experience to be flawless, has been the driver of Velocity's success with clients," says Simon Jones, who worked under Feig for 12 of his 15 years at Citi, most recently as global head of FX e-trading, prior to stepping down earlier this year.

Looking back, Feig recalls that one of the most significant sources of his vision for the future direction of e-FX was, ironically, US energy giant Enron. Prior to its bankruptcy in 2001, Enron was one of Citi's clients and, during a visit to its offices in the late 1990s, Feig saw a demonstration of what he believed the future single-bank platform would ultimately look like.

"For all its other faults, Enron had developed this concept of having a website with dealable, executable, two-way prices that its clients would want to trade. They really fostered this idea of a two-way market to centralise the flow of liquidity through their traders and gain a massive strategic edge. There were no single-bank systems that I was aware of that were doing this in FX – while Enron wasn't to be a part of the future, it had really pioneered this idea," he says.

Feig tried to persuade Citi's FX management team at the time to look at doing something similar in e-commerce, but it wasn't until he took the reins of the G-10 business in 2004 that he had the opportunity to start making significant changes. At that time, Citi had focused on building its presence on a single multibank platform, initially Atriax and later FXall, but Feig had other ideas about where the bank should put its focus.

"I came in with the view that we should be much more flexible in where we put our liquidity and not restrict it as we had done at the time. We weren't on Hotspot FX, Currenex or 360T at the time, and I said we should open up our liquidity where clients wanted it. Inside Citi, the traders and salespeople hated the tools on their desk – they were clunky, non-intuitive and old-fashioned. I knew we had to get to the point where people were impressed by our technology."

Meanwhile, Citi already had a partnership in place with Integral to develop a single-dealer platform, but it was another source of frustration for Feig, due to latency issues and a lack of flexibility to make changes. The platform went live under his leadership, but he pushed hard to move away from Integral as the fees, he felt, simply didn't justify the functionality the bank was getting.

In 2007, Citi promoted Anil Prasad to global head of FX and local markets. As Feig's new boss, Prasad reviewed the entire business and supported Feig's desire to part company with Integral. It was their joint decision to use the resources of Lava Trading, an order-routing company Citi had acquired in 2004, to develop a new platform. The result was the first iteration of the Velocity platform, which launched in early 2009. When Citi sold Lava to FXall at the end of that year, it was agreed Citi would keep on the staff that had developed, and were running, Velocity.

But Feig's drive to innovate didn't end with the launch of Velocity and, as a trader, he has always kept an eye on ways in which the platform could be improved. "I'd been pushing the Lava staff to improve the look-and-feel, but two years ago we started angling for a complete refresh of the platform to improve the underlying infrastructure and have a wickedly cool look-and-feel that would help us break into the single-dealer platform market in a way that the first Velocity hadn't done."

The launch of Velocity 2.0 in January 2012 was accompanied by great fanfare at Citi and, according to Feig, the number of active users has more than doubled over the past year. But while he and Prasad were both very active in giving ideas and providing strategic vision, Feig gives much of the credit to Alaa Saeed, global manager for Citi Velocity trading and the system's principal architect.

Beyond the Velocity project, Feig's other major achievement as head of G-10 has been the growth of the bank's FX prime-brokerage business – something he felt to be a major missing piece in 2004. Having fought internal resistance to invest in prime brokerage, Feig signed Citi up to Traiana, recognising the benefits of a single standard for prime brokerage. Then in 2006, he secured the prestigious appointment of Andy Coyne from Deutsche Bank, to run FX prime.

Under Coyne's leadership, the bank quickly moved forward and launched the Click platform for FX prime brokerage – here again it was Feig's drive, and passion for technology, that pushed the project forward, ensuring it was a success.

"Adding prime brokerage to the franchise increased our hedge fund footprint dramatically, and there is no question that Click was our entry point. Andy hired a good team, and he himself was a very trusted presence in this space, but he built an unbelievable system, so when they walked into client meetings, it was an easy sell," says Feig.

Coyne left Citi last year to become chief executive of Traiana, but the prime-brokerage business he built remains a market-leading jewel in the crown of Citi's FX business.

For Feig himself, after 24 years in FX, running Citi's G-10 business remains a challenge he relishes, using four words to sum it up: "interesting, dynamic, fun and global".

But for all the internal battles he has overcome to boost the FX business over the past decade, Feig has also faced an increasing number of external battles in more recent years, particularly in his role as chair of the New York Fed's FX Committee. With a heavy focus on steering the industry through the regulatory overhaul of the derivatives market, Feig believes much of the challenge relates to how the industry is perceived externally by regulators and politicians.

"People don't necessarily always understand the foreign exchange market – how it functioned well through the crisis, how efficient CLS was in mitigating risk, how transparent the markets are, and how clients tend to get a very open and transparent service. The risks of very heavy regulation would be to decrease that efficiency at a cost to the clients – if large parts of the market are cleared and traded on-exchange, you would see prices widen, players pull out and some of the market would move completely offshore," he says.

While industry advocacy and regular liaison with regulators and central banks has become an increasingly important part of Feig's role, expertise in technology remains his core strength. Working on broader technology and market structure issues than those affecting Citi alone is also something for which he is praised.

Feig recognises the importance of recent efforts by EBS to tackle disruptive behaviour and reconsider how orders are prioritised in the system. It is an entirely new trend, which for the first time in history is seeing market participants consider a reversal in the quest for greater speed.

"For us as an industry, the whole idea of speed, latency and market structure is an ongoing challenge. Historically the priority of orders has always been determined by speed, but sometimes you do have to prioritise real interest over fleeting interest. EBS is the first platform that has really tried to change the thinking on that, and I think trying to be fair and do the right thing is the biggest challenge when it comes to electronic systems. That's what we will all be grappling with in the coming years."