Women in the financial industry in Singapore have always held a significant role. According to a Deloitte study in 2021, women in the Singapore financial industry held 20.8% of C-suite roles and 24.5% of senior leadership roles, outperforming the Asia average, and 44.9% of managerial roles below senior leadership. The proportion of women on boards of Singapore’s top 100-listed companies has grown to 22.7% as of June 2023, up from 15.2% at the end of 2018 according to the Council for Board Diversity in Singapore. 

Read more: The TRADE launches Diversity & Inclusion Survey for 2024

Among our efforts as an exchange to promote diversity, we mandated listed companies to set a board diversity policy back in 2021. I believe the pandemic also played a role in getting organisations technically ready for flexible work practices. While progress has been made in advancing gender diversity, there is still some way to go in changing mindsets and encouraging a workplace culture that is truly inclusive. As a member of the executive committee of the Financial Women’s Association of Singapore, I am optimistic that with increased awareness, we will certainly move in the right direction!

In your work in equities and derivatives across Singapore, ASEAN, Middle East, India, and Australia where has the majority of the market’s attention been focused over the last six months?

Last year was marked by volatility and geopolitical risks and looks to continue into 2024. It ended with most Asian equity markets in positive territory despite tight monetary policy conditions and 2024 started with even higher volatility – for example, 30-day volatility in January was 17% (up 3 percentage points month-on-month) for FTSE China A50 index, 14% (up 4 percentage points) for Nifty50 index, with the Nifty50 index hitting an all-time high at 22,097 on 15 January 2024.

Our international customers continue to turn to our multi-asset offering in a persistently challenging macro environment. As a result, derivatives traded volumes on SGX have risen to record levels, with strong increases across equities, FX and commodities. Notably, we saw deep trading liquidity through the extended Lunar New Year holidays in Asia in February, as our markets remained open even though local markets were closed. Our SGX FTSE China A50 Index Futures, which is the most liquid international futures for Chinese equities, reached a new high in February with daily average volume of about 535,000 lots, the highest since August 2020.

An interesting one was the activity in SGX FTSE Taiwan Index futures on the back of TSMC – the largest component stock of the index – earnings release and positive news flow from the global technology sector through February. As global funds continue to be drawn to India, GIFT Nifty Futures saw significant activity as well as new record day volume (US$5.5B) and open interest (US$4.85B) in our SGX INR/USD Futures in February.

What are the key areas of divergence between the regions? 

There has been much discussion on this year’s global economic outlook, particularly around the interest rate environment. Rising geopolitical tensions and divergence in economic performance remain top of mind. With Asia contributing about two-thirds of global growth, investors around the world have also been looking for alpha opportunities in this region.

Market participants typically look at global markets based on their risk profile, investment objective and market familiarity. These shape their trading strategies, such as long/short equity, macro multi-strategy, tactical event-driven, etc. We have seen the investing and trading communities express their strategies on SGX as an effective and efficient venue to access close to 100% of Asia GDP across asset classes.

In the Asia-Pacific region, SGX’s products find a natural familiarity amongst investors by virtue of proximity and extensive economic and social ties. We have always had a ready audience in these regions for productive discussions. We are also having more of such conversations with diverse investors in the US and Europe, on the back of increasing volumes and liquidity in non-Asian time zones.

How can international institutions best navigate Asia’s idiosyncratic risks?

Asia is a very diverse and multi-faceted region, each country with its own development pace and unique market characteristics. SGX started as the first international derivatives exchange in Asia, with our roots in predecessor organisation SIMEX which goes back 40 years. We have been simplifying Asia for decades, with the aim to provide international investors with a highly liquid, single-point access to Asia, round the clock.

Having pioneered many products over time, we have fostered an enduring trust among customers that SGX operates with international best practices. It is our mission to be that central beacon for anyone seeking to participate in Asian multi-asset markets in equities, currency and commodities – bridging global investors to Asia and vice versa.

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The move comes as part of the firm’s strategy to expand its global client offering in the Asia Pacific region, allowing Marex to capture further growth opportunities through its combination of services that connect clients to markets.

“We are delighted to become a trading and clearing member of SGX, which is such an important exchange in the Asia Pacific,” said Arthur Fan, head of Asia Pacific at Marex.

“This important membership deepens our commitment to the region and gives us even greater opportunity to offer more services to more clients and expand our investment and operations across the region.”

Marex’s clearing business offers infrastructure services to a range of clients including banks, hedge funds, asset managers, corporates and trading groups. Marex also provides on-exchange liquidity through market making and agency and execution services, alongside over the counter, bespoke derivatives through its hedging and investment solutions business.

“Our strategy is to increase our capabilities to connect clients to markets in new ways across more geographies,” said Ian Lowitt, chief executive of Marex.

“This new membership allows us to both increase our clearing capabilities and our footprint in Asia Pacific. Singapore is a strategically important financial hub where we will continue to enhance our offering in line with our clients’ evolving needs.”

Earlier this month, Marex joined the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) as futures clearing and trading participant with the move slated to increase competition within the currently heavily concentrated market.

Through this addition, ASX – which currently only has a few participants – will see better counterparty risk management and more depth added to the marketplace, according to Marex.

“Marex’s scale and vast experience in the cleared derivatives markets is a great complement to our fast-growing derivatives franchise,” said Pol de Win, senior managing director, head of global sales and origination at SGX Group.

“We are excited to have Marex come onboard as a derivatives trading and clearing member given their specialised knowledge and expertise, that will help further deepen and diversify the derivatives ecosystem.”

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Lily Chia has been named the new head of equities and FICC sales, SGROA at Singapore Exchange (SGX), working across Singapore, ASEAN, Middle East, India, and Australia.

In this new position, Chia, who has spent almost two decades at SGX in various roles, will lead sales for equity, equity derivatives and FX derivatives.
 
Most recently, Chia was head of business integration & portfolio management, technology and prior to this, worked as head of commodities specialists and execution/clearing specialists.

Before joining SGX, she spent three years as middle office and credit manager at DBS Vickers Securities, and before that worked as a senior associate working in corporate strategy at SIMEX.

Back in 2021, SGX agreed to acquire FX trading platform, MaxxTrader, from FlexTrade Systems, for $125 million in a bid to further expand its FX remit. The turnkey FX trading platform is designed to allow sell-side institutions to privately manage and issue price information to clients and the market.

At the time, SGX said its strong sell-side client base complimented the buy-side clientele of BidFX, which it agreed to acquire the remaining stake of for $128 million in June last year. The exchange added the combined offerings of MaxxTrader and BidFX would enable it to create an FX ecosystem connecting the buy- and sell-side.

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Singapore Exchange (SGX) subsidiary MaxxTrader, a single source and direct-to-market FX trading platform, has deepened the digital liquidity pool with the launch of MaxxDigital, a new digital asset trading solution. 

MaxxTrader’s first foray into the digital space, MaxxDigital offers OTC FX execution features for digital assets trading, as well as streaming, Request for Stream (RFS) and Request for Quote workflows. Users gain access to a deeper liquidity pool, ranging from OTC exchanges and market makers to electronic communication network (ECN) and exchanges offering listed crypto futures. 

They can also leverage native MaxxTrader algorithms for digital assets trading such as time-weighted average price (TWAP) and volume-weighted average price (VWAP), as well as basket trading algorithms for constructing and trading custom digital assets baskets and/or hedging exposure for exchange-traded funds (ETFs). Future plans include adding new algos to achieve best execution and reduce transaction costs. 

“There is currently a large gap in the digital assets trading market for a robust, functionality-rich trading solution and we believe that MaxxDigital can fill this critical gap,” said MaxxTrader CEO Manish Kedia.  

DBS, the largest bank in Southeast Asia with over $600 billion in assets, was the first institution to go live on the platform. “Partnering with MaxxTrader and leveraging their expertise enhances our digital asset trading offering and trading hours even over weekends without having to commit to additional backend resources,” said Jacky Tai, managing director, group head of trading and structuring, treasury and markets at DBS. “Our ability to streamline the end-to-end process efficiently enables us to explore the market’s full potential by providing even more dynamic pricing, financing, and risk solutions around the clock.”  

MaxxTrader, formerly owned by FlexTrade, was acquired by SGX in July last year for $125 million. Headquartered in Singapore, the firm has provided FX pricing and risk solutions for sell-side institutions including banks and broker-dealers, as well as a multi-dealer platform for hedge funds, since 2007. Its acquisition followed SGX’s previous acquisition of BidFX in 2020, a cloud-based provider of electronic FX trading solutions with a largely buy-side clientele, cementing the exchange’s ambitions to become a central Asian FX marketplace for global investors. 

“Since SGX expanded from FX futures to the global FX OTC market, we continue to cement our footprint in this fast-growing and sizeable US$6.6 trillion-a day global market. We are excited to acquire MaxxTrader, which further enhances our FX OTC offering and widens our customer base across the sell- and buy-side,” said SGX CEO Loh Boon Chye at the time of the deal.  

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The Singapore Exchange (SGX) and Temasek digital asset joint venture’s new partners include Barclays, BNP Paribas, BNY Mellon, Citi, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Orient Securities International, Standard Chartered, Societe Generale and UOB.

These ten partners will work alongside Marketnode to increase the usage of its platform, help with product development by providing market input, co-create DLT solutions and work towards product expansion beyond fixed income.

Set to launch in Q4 this year, Marketnode’s fixed income issuer services platform will provide issuers, law firms and banks with services including documentation streamlining, investor engagement tools, ESG reporting and market access mechanisms, all of which are powered by data analysis.

Marketnode currently works in collaboration with Covalent Capital and will also partner with Singapore-based FinTech RootAnt Global, and UK-based blockchain solution platform SETL to build out its fixed income and multi-asset end-to-end infrastructure.

Announced in February, Marketnode’s partnership with Covalent Capital has seen both parties launch integrated offerings such as auto-ISIN generation and digital bond straight-through processing.

Marketnode will continue to work in collaboration with the industry and its partners to jointly create applications aiming to bring increased efficiency to capital markets.

“The participation of these banks onto the Marketnode platform is a significant milestone. It further validates the market for end-to-end infrastructure, and services for digital assets,” said Pradyumna Agrawal, managing director, Blockchain@Temasek.  

“Their contributions towards enhancing the platform’s offerings and capabilities will be invaluable. We look forward to welcoming more market participants as increased industry involvement will foster scale, robustness and spur greater capital markets infrastructure innovation.”

Earlier this month, in another significant development for digital market infrastructure, SIX Digital Exchange AG received authorisation from the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) to act as a central securities depository, while associated company, SDX Trading, received authorisation to act as a stock exchange.

The authorisation allows SDX to go live with a fully regulated, integrated trading, settlement, and custody infrastructure based on distributed ledger technology for digital securities.

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Commerzbank has rolled out its suite of five FX algorithmic trading strategies on the BidFX platform as part of its latest expansion.

The move means traders using the BidFX platform can now access the algo suite directly, including a range of execution strategies suited to trading preferences and requirements.

“Commerzbank welcomes the opportunity to increase our electronic distribution of our FX orders service on BidFX. This allows us to continue to provide advanced technology, unique liquidity and analytics to our mutual clients,” said Nickolas Congdon, head of eTrading services at Commerzbank.

BidFX is now a wholly owned subsidiary of the Singapore Exchange (SGX) after the exchange confirmed it would be fully acquiring the institutional FX trading platform provider from TradingScreen for $128 million in June last year. 

SGX had previously owned a partial stake in the firm after it acquired 20% of it in March 2019 for $25 million. 

Since its acquisition BidFX has launched several initiatives, most recently unveiling a new data and analytics suite aimed at providing institutions better FX pricing and liquidity insights, BidFX Data and Analytics. 

Commerzbank is the latest major institution to launch its algo suite on the BidFX platform. State Street made its algorithms available to traders on the platform in December, following other firms such as Nomura and RBC Capital Markets.

“It’s exciting to see the continued growth of our global relationship with Commerzbank via the integration of their algo suite, which is largely being driven by our asset management clientele,” added Rory Sheen, head of sales for Germany, Austria and Switzerland at BidFX.

“As buy-side market participants continue to increase their usage of FX algos to source the best liquidity and execute efficiently for their end investors, Commerzbank’s algo strategies are a welcome addition to the BidFX algo hub.” 

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Known as Trumid XT, the platform will combine Trumid’s technology with SGX’s market infrastructure in Asia.

It will connect liquidity from both the SGX Bond Pro and Trumid’s Market Centre platforms in the US to provide a network for Asian fixed income trading.

The project’s main aim is to increase international access to bond markets in Asia while facilitating Asian investor participation in US and emerging market credit.  

“Our upcoming platform, Trumid XT, is the missing link between Asian and US markets and will connect their respective liquidity pools in a transparent and efficient manner,” said Loh Boon Chye, CEO of SGX. “Offering solutions that support the existing dealer-to-client market structure as well as investor-to-investor, Trumid XT will create network effects that can unlock significant opportunities in Asian bond trading markets for our clients.”

SGX, Trumid and Hillhouse Capital have formed a joint venture for the initiative, named XinTru. Its management team includes Trumid chief revenue officer, Ben Falloon, and head of fixed income at SGX, Mark Leahy.

Trumid and SGX have been long-standing partners after the exchange group led a $53 million funding round in the platform provider in 2018, which led to Hillhouse Capital’s participation in a further Trumid funding round the following year. The investment paved the way for SGX’s collaboration on Trumid XT, SGX’s Chye added.  

“Leveraging our Asian network and our Bond Pro business, we are excited to partner with Trumid and Hillhouse to accelerate the digitalisation and realise the full potential of Asia’s bond trading markets. XinTru brings together the unique characteristics of the partners in a joint venture where the sum is much greater than the parts.”

The venture marks Trumid has reported record growth in the past year as its bond trading volumes surged 500% in April as traders increasingly engaged with its anonymous all-to-all trading protocol. In January, the firm secured $50 million in its latest funding round led by new investor DST Global and Dragoneer Investment Group.

“Our US experience demonstrates that built-for-purpose technology and workflow tools can transform the bond trading experience,” said Mike Sobel, president of Trumid. “With our partners, we look forward to adding value for our global client base and driving growth of electronic bond trading in Asia.”

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The co-location as a service (CaaS) was launched in partnership with SGX amid increased demand from clients for faster access to the exchange operator with both shared and direct fibre uplinks via the Beeks infrastructure.

Beeks first added SGX to its infrastructure in June 2018 to provide cloud solutions and market data access for automated trading on the exchange. Its infrastructure is directly connected to SGX in Tokyo, London and Hong Kong for ultra-low latency trading between locations.

Ng Kin Yee, head of data, connectivity and indices at SGX, commented that the role of infrastructure and CaaS has become increasingly important due to the COVID-19 pandemic and digital transformation of businesses globally.

“We are delighted to be partnering Beeks to provide our customers with access to SGX’s mission-critical engines at the fastest speeds, without the need for physical access to the data centre and the associated upfront costs,” Yee added. “As more firms migrate to cloud-based services, we will continue to provide innovative and resilient solutions to cater to changing industry needs.”

Recently, the SGX and Aquis Exchange partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to prove that trading can be fully deployed on the cloud for cost optimisation and scalability as part of a proof of concept project.

The trio confirmed that they had been successful in developing the proof of concept, which showed that running matching and messaging in the cloud is a viable option. 

“Singapore is a key global trading hub and we have received substantial demand from our institutional clients to expand low latency trading solutions,” Gordon McArthur, CEO at Beeks, added.

“This partnership will allow Beeks to better fulfil the requirements of our customers by offering a wider variety of connectivity options, and to attract more financial enterprises looking for cost-effective trading infrastructure in this geography.”

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The trio confirmed that they had been successful in developing the proof of concept, which showed that running matching and messaging in the cloud is a viable option.  

Complex exchange architecture and operations worked as efficiently in the cloud as in physical data centres, the project proved. It produced a cloud-native exchange that had low latency and minimal ‘jitter’ in consistency while using multicasting technology, which is used to transmit data to a group of destinations simultaneously.

“The cloud-enabled marketplace we created has easy-to-manage infrastructure that is scalable and highly performant and would reduce the reliance on a data centre footprint and corresponding infrastructure and network overheads,” said Adrian Ip, director of Aquis Technologies. “This opens up a range of new possibilities for Aquis and for the whole exchange sector.” 

Market participants have been making moves to transition trading activity to the cloud with AWS in recent months. Most recently in October, Trading technology provider Itiviti confirmed it would be transferring its entire platform to the cloud using a hybrid private-public strategy with AWS.  

“We are excited by the results of the Aquis proof of concept with SGX, which defines a path to free customers from maintaining legacy on-premises infrastructure and implementing complex workarounds to run multicast workloads in the cloud,” said Mayumi Hiramatsu, vice president of EC2 networking at AWS.  

“With native support for multicast, AWS Transit Gateway makes it easy for Aquis to deploy trading applications that require multicast messaging while having the ability to monitor, manage, and scale multicast configurations for hundreds of receivers.”

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The new futures mark an extension of the long-standing clearing relationship between SGX and CME Group after establishing their mutual offset system (MOS) for clients to trade and clear Asia and US derivatives markets in 1984.

“This [expansion] will enhance our offering in terms of providing our mutual customers the platform to manage their overnight risks in an effective and timely manner, and giving them greater access to the combined liquidity of both SGX and CME Group in a single marketplace,” said Tim McCourt, global head of equity index and alternative investment products at CME Group. 

Three net total return (NTR) futures contracts, SGX FTSE Emerging Market NTR (USD) index futures, SGX FTSE Japan NTR (USD) index futures, and SGX FTSE New Zealand NTR (USD) index futures, will launch on 23 November. 

The remaining two price return contracts, SGX FTSE Emerging Market (USD) index futures and SGX FTSE China H50 (USD) index futures will launch at the same time and become available on MOS in the first half of next year.

News of the derivatives’ launch follows confirmation in August that SGX and the London Stock Exchange Group’s FTSE Russell’s had entered into a long- term strategic partnership to develop a multi-asset index derivatives offering focused on Asian and emerging markets.

“This collaboration will enhance global access for investors wishing to the trade and clear Asian equity derivatives outside of the region and bolster liquidity across products,” said Waqas Samad, FTSE Russell chief executive. “Working closely with SGX, the addition of five new index futures contracts reflects our joint commitment to meeting investor demand for equity derivative and options trading as well as ETFs across Asia Pacific.

“As highly liquid multi-asset derivatives exchanges, both SGX and CME Group continue to play an important role in the creation of global risk management products centred on FTSE Russell index futures.” 

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