Best single-dealer platform: Citi

Citi’s Velocity 3.0 has long been among the most established single-dealer FX platforms, but 2025 offered a fresh test of its reliability. After the sharp fall in the dollar that followed President Donald Trump’s 2025 ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs on imported goods in April, volatility spiked and liquidity thinned across the market. Many systems faltered under the strain but Citi’s did not.

“In moments of extreme volatility, we always see a flight to quality,” says Ayesa Latif, Citi’s global head of FX products. “By quality, clients mean the depth of liquidity, the strength of market-making, and the stability and resilience of the platform.” During the Liberation Day event, that quality was tested in real time. Velocity continued to deliver uninterrupted pricing and execution as clients turned to the platform for liquidity they could rely on.

Velocity 3.0’s underlying design explains that consistency. It runs multiple live instances worldwide, allowing what Latif calls “seamless intraday cutovers, where the client won’t even experience a glitch”. Behind the scenes, the architecture has been refined to improve data flow and trade processing – strengthening resilience under stress and speeding up execution in normal conditions.

That robustness helped draw flows at a time competitors saw declines. Citi reports a 43% year-on-year increase in average daily volumes on Velocity during April 2025, while a peer group of rivals fell back. The performance reinforced a reputation built during earlier market shocks: that Velocity stays open when others do not.

Stability, though, is only part of its appeal. Over the past year, Citi has refocused Velocity 3.0 on modularity and integration, an approach Citi calls “eFX à la carte”. The platform’s micro-services architecture lets Citi tailor functionality to the user, rather than forcing clients into a single template. Latif says the goal is “to meet clients where they want to be met, and how they want to be met”, whether that means onshore liquidity, derivatives execution or analytics embedded in their own workflow.

Operational risk and compliance checks

That adaptability has become increasingly valuable as clients extend into restricted and emerging markets, where op risk is high and access often fragmented. “Clients worry about whether they’ll get their FX done on time,” Latif notes. “We’ve built automated workflow solutions so they don’t face failed settlements – and they get a more transparent rate as well.”

Citi has coupled those workflow tools with compliance checks that automatically confirm whether users are licensed and documented to trade in each market. “Our checks will ensure that clients have a correctly declared trade purpose to meet trade reporting requirements, and our onboarding checks will ensure the entity is licensed to trade in that market.”

Citi’s local market build-out has been extensive, adding benchmark fixings, regulatory workflows and trading for non-deliverable forwards (NDFs) across several key jurisdictions. These capabilities allow clients to manage FX exposures electronically across multiple jurisdictions while satisfying local reporting and taxation rules.

Fully automated, fully integrated

Velocity 3.0’s integration layer has also evolved. Regional banks now stage orders directly into Citi’s order book overnight, asset managers connect directly through their order management system (OMS) to reduce brokerage costs, and corporate treasuries can upload exposure files for automatic validation by the platform. When some clients asked for an alternative to screen-based execution, Citi responded with a local markets application programming interface.

“Clients wanted the option not to log into Velocity at all,” Latif says. “Now they can originate and stage orders from their OMS directly into Velocity – fully automated, front to back.”

Elsewhere, Citi has enhanced Velocity’s investor and issuer FX product with a new “global window”, providing access both to restricted and unrestricted markets through a single legal entity. Exchange-traded fund and overlay tools automate FX timing around security trades to reduce slippage. Thanks to a new digital onboarding system, client setup times have been reduced from weeks to hours, with more than 80% of requests completed in under a day.

Expanded execution

Execution technology continues to develop.  Velocity now supports new order types and expanded algorithmic execution with greater transparency and analytics. In FX options, Citi has begun a multiyear infrastructure upgrade under the project name Evolve.

Looking ahead, Latif expects deeper automation and a continued shift towards onshore market electronification. “We’re bringing our e-trading teams closer to our traditional voice market-makers to build a more automated electronic price-distribution mechanism,” she says. “It’s the same evolution we have seen in the cash, NDF and options markets over the past decade – making pricing and workflows more electronic and transparent.”

Citi was named Best single-dealer platform at the FX Markets e-FX Awards 2025.

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