E-FX Awards 2014: Innovation reigns supreme during challenging times

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The past 12 months have been one of the most difficult periods that currency traders and the FX industry have ever faced. Market participants often describe the current conditions as a perfect storm, due to historically low volatility and interest rates in major developed economies, an ever-growing regulatory burden and a damaging, very publicly fought enquiry into benchmarks.

But it is technology that has sparked the most significant structural changes in the industry. The growth of electronic trading has contributed to a significant margin compression in segments such as G-10 spot, which have become severely commoditised and hit global banks' bottom lines.

Technology has also allowed new players to enter the market and contribute to the start of the breakdown of the two-tier, dealer-to-dealer and dealer-to-customer market. Non-bank market-makers have gradually gained ground and respectability, reflected in FX Week's newly introduced category for these market participants – and newcomers are forever entering the market.

Internalisation and agency execution are also on the rise, moving the traditionally purely principle-based business closer to the direct-execution model predominantly used in equities.

At the same time, buy-side market participants are becoming more sophisticated in both trading technology and measuring execution quality as new tools crop up to help model various execution outcomes and increasingly sophisticated methods of transaction cost-analysis.

It is against this backdrop of drastic change and market-wide challenges that FX Week's 11th annual e-FX awards opened. Despite the difficult market, it quickly became apparent that entries were of the highest possible standard, placing our judges in the unenviable position of having to select the best of the best.

As ever, I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to the members of the judging panel, who all put valuable time and effort into sifting through the submissions and evaluating them objectively.

As my predecessor Joel Clark said last year in this very column, without the insight and expertise of our judges we simply wouldn't be able to run these awards. As in previous years, their input was combined with a due diligence process whereby customer referees were contacted by FX Week staff to validate submissions.

Congratulations to all of this year's winners, and commiserations to those who missed out this time around! I'm confident the quality that so clearly shone through the submissions of all entries will be rewarded with acknowledgements in the coming years. Innovation, as ever, will win out.

I look forward to seeing you at FX Week USA in New York this week, where the awards will be presented.

Eva Szalay
Editor, FX Week

Judging panel:
Eva Szalay, editor, FX Week
Robert Mackenzie Smith, senior reporter, FX Week
Javier Paz, senior analyst, Aite Group
Lisa Seim, principal, Strategic Exchanges Innovative Markets
Rupert Bull, managing partner, Expand Research
James Sinclair, chief executive officer, MarketFactory
Frederic Ponzo, managing partner, GreySpark Partners