e-FX Achievement of the Year: Jon Vollemaere

Jon Vollemaere started his career in foreign exchange at a time when electronic trading was little more than a vision of the future, in 1992. Voice trading being the norm at the time, Vollemaere's involvement with the then nascent Reuters D22 dealing platform, the first e-FX venue, was the sign of things to come as the young twenty-something generation entered the ranks of currency trading via what was to become the e-commerce world.

"I've been involved with e-FX from the start," says Vollemaere, who won the 2016 FX Week e-FX Achievement of the Year award.

"My first proper job was on Reuters D22 Matching, which really was the first e-FX service – well before the term e-commerce came along a few years later. It was a great team of people, many of them still in the business, and we had a lot of fun. It was the pre-internet, pre-email age when Uber was just a German adjective," he says.

Currenex really was the first multi-bank ECN and we had to convince the banks to use it, which was initially very hard
Jon Vollemaere, R5FX

After leaving Reuters, Vollemaere joined Currenex, a start-up founded in 1999, as part of the original team that paved the way for the first multi-bank ECN to gain market share, eventually being sold to State Street for $564 million in cash in 2007.

"Currenex really was the first multi-bank ECN and we had to convince the banks to use it, which was initially very hard," he recalls.

This pattern of trying to convince market participants to look at future trends and prepare for them remained with Vollemaere throughout his career.

"After Currenex, I spent my time telling banks that paying attention to retail flow was a good idea, and later that social media, low latency and HFT were all something that were going to change the status quo," he says.

Vollemaere's roles included stints at FXCM and Barclays, before co-founding and building-out global low-latency network FXecosystem, followed by the establishment of retail FX trading community LetsTalkFX.

Emerging markets

In 2011, he realised regulation would make it exceptionally difficult for emerging markets contracts, mainly non-deliverable forwards (NDF), to continue trading in the traditional voice-driven manner, as costs for dealers were set to rise exponentially. So he developed a central-credit component for the first electronic, multi-dealer NDF-trading platform, R5FX.

"Now I spend my day telling banks they should pay attention to China, India and central credit," Vollemaere continues.

Since his first days in the market, the industry has fundamentally changed, with transparency hitting margins, making it increasingly important to manage flows and get technological requirements right.

"Ultimately, the customer has got a better deal and the market-makers have had to process more deals at lower margins," Vollemaere says. "But I guess the biggest change is the noise levels on the trading floors. Most of the time it's just so quiet now."