Wells Fargo has worked to become a top-tier institutional FX provider by leveraging its robust corporate and commercial FX franchise. To accomplish this, it has been actively building its capabilities in the e-trading space.
These efforts are clearly paying off, and the firm has gained traction and market share among institutional FX clients. Over the last two years the bank has risen through the rankings across most electronic platforms to be recognised as a top 10 FX provider.
Thanks to an overhaul of its e-trading architecture, Wells Fargo can now offer competitive pricing and connectivity to clients. It has a growing reputation for being a provider in executable streaming prices and request for quotes for spot, outright, swaps and non-deliverable forwards, and is now rated on multi-dealer platforms as one of the leading FX providers. It is also classed as a top-tier participant on leading anonymous electronic communications networks too.
The numbers tell the story: institutional e-FX volumes have risen 400% since January 2022 across all client segments, including hedge funds, asset managers and banks.
“We are honoured to be recognised by Euromoney as the best FX bank in North America,” says Vince Hindman, head of FX at Wells Fargo. “This recognition underscores the success of our investments in the strategic growth of our FX business, expanding the capabilities of our institutional sales and trading platform, and investing in our people and technology in order to best serve our clients.”
Following its revamp of the e-FX technology stack to include a new price engine and connectivity infrastructure, Wells Fargo has also established connectivity across 14 venues in both the NY4 and LD4 datacentres. Many clients are now connected directly via application interfaces (APIs) and the bank has rolled out a new single-dealer platform tailored to the institutional client base.
Wells Fargo also has ambitions to become a leading provider of emerging-market NDFs. Following an aggressive build on the NDF trading front, it recently added auto-pricing of NDFs to the offering.
The bank is now ranked as one of the top three NDF providers on leading multidealer platforms. Wells Fargo has a large local banking presence across EM as the USD clearer for many international banks, which creates synergies and the ability to warehouse/internalise risk and to provide liquidity in large size on illiquid pairs.