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Sales Traders have traditionally been poorly served in terms of dedicated sales trader GUIs. This I think is related to salespeople being overly protective of their client relationships, and fearful that quoting clients electronically would in some way result in them being disintermediated by the machine.

Preferring instead to trade with clients by phone, thus ‘protecting and enhancing their personal ‘high touch’ relationship’ with the client. As a result, Sales GUIs never really received the attention they deserved, or needed.

Well, that’s going to change, for a variety of reasons, the main ones being:

1. Regulation: Following the multi billion dollar fines banks received around sharing information relating to client orders in chat rooms, and front-running client order, there is now an increased regulatory focus on FX sales practices such as lack of time stamps for client trades, and the level of hard sales mark-ups.
2. Civil lawsuits/reputational/personal risk: Senior management are rightly concerned about the number of civil lawsuits around FX sales practices for which they must take responsibility, with the resultant fallout from lawsuits hitting share prices, bonuses and in some cases for which they may be personally liable.
3. Accountability and control: As a result, management need to ensure they invest in technology solutions that enable them to identify, measure, and place limits on the level of sales markups that are applied to client trades.
4. Efficient scalable sales coverage: As banks reduce the number of sales traders, and automate more of the process of client pricing and execution, clients will start to receive more consistent pricing. However, without access to client’s historical trade blotters, it will become harder for sales to add value as they won’t know the trades the client has done electronically, and won’t be familiar with the spreads that should be added to particular client trades.
5. Understanding client behavior: By leveraging underlying trading platform MIS data, banks can better understand client trading behavior, and more effectively price clients based on their hit rate sensitivity as shown by the MIS data around client trade interaction.
6. Best Execution & Agency Desks: The rise in clients seeking Best Execution, has resulted in banks setting up agency execution desks, with sales teams that provide execution expertise for a brokerage fee, rather than acting as principal and earning the bid-ask spread and a hard sales markup on the trade.

Vendors such as Caplin, already provide HTML5 Sales GUI dashboards, that enable sales teams to trade on behalf of clients, whilst integrating client CRM and execution platform MIS metrics to show hit rates/currency, and sales markup spreads to enable to more effectively price client trades.

Caplin FX Sales Dashboard

Interestingly, earlier this week, a new US based firm called Orca SMT, announced the release of the beta version of their downloadable FX Sales Trader GUI.

According to Daniel Osborne, chief executive of Orca SMT.

“What’s lacking is salespeople having the tools to very quickly and efficiently apply that predetermined spread on each trade.”:

Orca SMT is a new application service for the FX desks of Banks and Broker Dealers. It’s an intuitive interface that helps optimize pricing to clients at the point of trade. SMT stands for “Sales, Management and Trading”.

Orca SMT FX Sales Dashboard

Filed under: FX, Paul Blank, Regulation, Technology Trends |