e-FX awards 2025 – the winners

Liquidity provision categories

• Best liquidity provider for spot: Citadel Securities

Citadel Securities made impressive gains to become one of the top LPs in the primary market. It also saw a significant increase in bilateral streaming partnerships with banks.

• Best liquidity provider for forwards/swaps: Barclays

The UK bank achieved significant growth in FX swaps market share, and made key innovations across electronic pricing, including smart-mids – blending multiple inputs to create reliable market curves – and real-time liquidity performance analytics.

• Best liquidity provider for options: JP Morgan

JP Morgan is recognised for its advanced electronic FX options offering, supporting a wide range of vanilla and exotic structures, resulting in significant year-on-year growth in electronic volumes and daily users trading options on its single-dealer platform.

• Best liquidity provider for financial institutions (asset managers, banks, hedge funds): Deutsche Bank

In dealing with financial institutions like hedge funds and asset managers, Deutsche Bank saw notable increases in revenues and volumes. Its top innovation came in the launch of HausFX to meet the evolving needs of asset managers.

• Best liquidity provider for corporates: Barclays

Barclays was awarded for significantly evolving its product and execution offering with corporates, and reported major growth in deal-contingent transactions during a year where global M&A activity was up and down.

• Best FX algo provider: Deutsche Bank

As a top algo provider, judges were impressed by its increasing volumes, improved performance against other liquidity-seeking algos, and souped-up infrastructure that can handle 10 times more capacity.

• Best new FX algo solution: BNP Paribas

BNP Paribas was awarded for its recently launched ‘gold label’ partnership solution, giving other partner banks such as Lloyds the opportunity to use its flagship FX algos.

• Best FX structuring solution: Goldman Sachs

Goldman Sachs’ visual structuring solution’s recent expansion into Delta One products to help clients test and display RFQ vs algo pre-trade TCA was deemed very impressive, and has now become a central tool for the FX sales team.

• Best single-dealer platform: Citi

Judges awarded Citi for its state-of-the-art technology, rolling out its revamped platform to emerging markets and adding a range of new algo execution capabilities.

• Best FX prime broker: NatWest

NatWest demonstrated for the third year in a row why it is a highly rated provider. After setting new records in prime broker mandates and achieving significant volume growth, it also launched new FXPB models to trade with asset manager clients.

Buy-side categories

• Best FX hedging initiative: Russell Investments

Russell Investments was awarded for its unique problem-solving approach, implementing a dynamic USD/JPY hedging model that enabled it to expand an existing client mandate and secure another significant one.

• Best FX execution initiative: JP Morgan Asset Management

The fund manager enhanced its execution strategy through the development and implementation of a proprietary order and execution management system, designed to facilitate bilateral connectivity with select partners.

• Best FX investment strategy: Record Currency Management

The firm developed a unique strategy to use a diversified funding basket of developed market currencies, to be used against long positions in emerging markets currencies, enabling it to express relative value views and capture alpha.

Venue categories

• Best venue for forwards/swaps: 360t

360T made several key inroads with partner banks to boost its electronic interbank swaps initiative, expanded its range of solutions for the buy side with a differentiated forward fixing offering, and printed its first “mixed given” trades.

• Best venue for options: Digital Vega

The Digital Vega platform continues to improve its scope and product offering, and has brought a range of new automated FX option execution capabilities to both LPs and buy-side users.

• Best venue for NDFs: EBS Market

EBS recorded several record days in currency pairs such as the Taiwan dollar throughout this year’s market volatility, expanded into Latin America currencies, and created a single liquidity pool to make it easier for new participants to connect.

• Best exchange for FX: CME Group

Unsurprisingly, CME Group continues to achieve new volume records for FX futures, and has established itself as a potential G10 primary market, while also innovating with its new Spot+ venture to bridge the spot and futures market.

• Best FX EMS: Bloomberg

Bloomberg brings a variety of offerings to automate execution for buy-side users such as auto-routing and staged fixing orders. It also expanded support for advanced algorithmic execution and introduced auction functionalities.

• Best new venue initiative: Finteum

Despite being an early-stage start-up, Finteum has significant potential to dramatically lower funding costs for banks through its intraday FX swaps platform. It has made good progress in its journey to go live, signing on three banks, and has already conducted its first set of trades.

Infrastructure and services categories

• Best FX overlay manager: State Street

State Street has established itself as the largest provider in the space and continues to show growth with asset owners and alternative investment managers. It also continues to expand its range of hedging solutions for onshore currencies and invested in new automated workflows.

• Best FX outsourced trading solution: State Street

Judges awarded high scores to State Street for its one-stop-shop capabilities, delivered through its universal FX manager model, and expanded use of TCA for best execution

• Best FX post-trade initiative (clearing, collateral management, settlement): Caplin Systems

This vendor recently expanded the scope and sophistication of its FX post-trade capabilities across several sectors, working with banks to eliminate manual post-trade errors and helping them to transform their trade affirmation and allocation workflows.

• Best e-FX solution for corporates: MillTech

Milltech recorded high double-digit year-on-year revenue growth with corporates throughout the second quarter mayhem, with a major increase in trades executed. It also incorporated an AI hedging simulator and a new cash management solution in collaboration with the world’s biggest asset manager.

Technology categories

• Best trading technology vendor for FX: Quod Financial

This provider made significant enhancements to its underlying architecture, introduced AI-based execution logic for liquidity selection and order handling, and shortened time-to-market for new clients.

• Best connectivity, hosting and co-location service: 4OTC

4OTC was awarded after it fully launched its co-located connectivity service to enable LPs to stream liquidity in digital assets and FX, and continues to establish new connectivity to platforms, exchanges and LPs globally.

• Best independent TCA provider: Tradefeedr

Tradefeedr was highly commended for establishing AI-based workflows, and creating a truly unique pre-trade TCA tool for RFQ and algo execution.

• Best market data provider: New Change FX

New Change FX was awarded for its impressive list of market data products and new real-time data solutions. It also made key improvements in building market-neutral forwards pricing curves and rolling out an advanced options cut service.

• Best liquidity aggregation service: smartTrade Technologies

Judges recognised the vendor’s impressive growth with LPs, and detail in helping banks achieve tighter spreads and reduced slippage through new enhancements such as an AI-driven smart order router.