UBS's single-dealer platform, UBS Neo, has benefited from a full front-to-back transformation over the last four years, enabling the bank to offer clients access to consistent liquidity provisioning in foreign exchange across products and currency pairs.
Recent developments have focused on innovative features to enhance clients’ ease of transacting. The bank has invested in short-term interest rate (Stir) analytics – a state-of-the-art analytics tool for swaps that breaks swap prices into components (FX overnight index swap and OIS) and provides information on historical and current FX-OIS and x-currency levels.
It provides unique data that is not easily accessible via other mainstream market-data providers, helps clients identify trends and predict price action from market events, and allows traders to mark the curve and update data 24/5.
An important new feature for FX options is smart text entry, which allows for quick ticket generation. It is designed to facilitate copy and paste from chats, and continuously learns from user inputs and corrections.
“Our analytics and product footprint has been further improved to add back-testing capabilities and event weight market data screens, helping clients identify the best derivative expression to suit their objectives,” says Natali Blondeau, FX options product manager. “Our FX exotic options offering is increasing and we have recently extended streaming of prices to exotic options.”
The cash blotter has been revamped to support predictive search, emphasising the importance of a seamless user experience. Looking forward, UBS is undertaking a multi-year rewrite of its resting order book, with the aim of combining a modern user interface with increased throughput. This will allow it to scale the offering to include additional order types, supported across multiple channels.
UBS has adopted the UBS Neo framework as its firm-wide platform, hosting relevant applications including a sales engine room that consolidates the bank’s data and analytics capability, global market overview and understanding of individual clients.
These developments have allowed UBS to capture additional volume on its single-dealer platform from new clients that value deep liquidity and spread stability.