Do humans still have a role in institutional FX?

It’s 2025 and you attend another foreign exchange industry conference where, unsurprisingly, the hot topics remain familiar: data-driven FX, streaming swaps, workflow automation, the ‘electronification’ of liquidity, debates on what AI means for our jobs, algo evaluation, and fully automated trade workflows.

You return to the office, only to have a conversation with a bank about the “juniorisation” of FX sales desks and the merging of voice and e-sales into leaner teams covering both. It’s enough to make you pause – between electronic trades of course – and ask: are we heading towards a world where institutional FX sales and buy-side trading is almost entirely automated, with fewer humans?

On one side of the argument, execution costs seem lower than ever, and a huge proportion of flow can be handled automatically or electronically. Do we really need people to execute small, liquid, or short-dated trades? And then algos are there for the bigger trades.

Increasingly, traders are expected to focus on analytics over execution. (Incidentally, this shift also seems to have reduced the number of FX sales/buy-side trader dinners in Mayfair – a perhaps under-reported casualty of the modern era.) And if you really must write meeting notes? Well, there’s always ChatGPT for that… although if my manager is reading this, I assure you I typed this one myself.

Manual processes remain stubbornly embedded in most organisations – why? Because clients constantly request bespoke services – and bespoke rarely means ‘instant automation’

On the other hand, the human workload is far from disappearing. Last week alone I clocked 15 hours of meetings spanning compliance, onboarding, trading, PMs, HR, reporting, risk and IT.

A quick survey of FX sales contacts at banks revealed they each averaged more than 10 hours of meetings in the same week. Many banks also still employ trade support staff to manually key in trades and handle other operational tasks – apparently FX salespeople are still valued for their Mayfair dinner skills as much as their operational prowess.

In our own case, 100% of frontier market trades and 50% of emerging markets trades are still executed via voice, and every day a trade is rejected for some kind of ‘credit’ reason, requiring a human to troubleshoot the so-called ‘auto’ pricer. (In my experience, this problem is often mysteriously resolved with the flick of a switch.)

Manual processes remain stubbornly embedded in most organisations – why? Because clients constantly request bespoke services – and bespoke rarely means ‘instant automation’.

While spreads are razor-thin and much can be done electronically, the ability to operate at such efficiency is itself the result of years of human effort: onboarding clients, understanding fund strategies, running execution quality analyses, meeting counterparties and producing bank performance reviews.

The real value add of humans hasn’t vanished – it has simply shifted. Instead of being concentrated at the moment of execution, it’s now front-loaded into the earlier stages of the trade lifecycle: relationship building; portfolio setup; and quality oversight and analysis.

So no, the role of humans – and of FX specialists in particular – isn’t obsolete. But the job description is evolving. Perhaps heads of trading should spend less time pressing the execute button and more time finding new ways to add value; who knows, in this new era perhaps that maybe by writing FX Markets articles.

Nathan Vurgest is head of trading at Record Currency Management