It has become increasingly difficult to distinguish one good cash trading system from another. Most sites for trading spot, forwards and swaps in forex have indicative streaming prices, request-for-quote trading screens and online blotters that log trade details and that can, where requested, feed directly into a client's treasury management system.
The winner here, Citigroup, offers the widest range of quality cash execution tools for the widest range of clients.
Some banks' systems cannot take and work orders for clients over time. Citigroup's can, and it has gone one step further in the development of CitiFX Benchmark. This is not a new product for the bank. It has been around for five years, has more than 100 clients using it and, according to the bank, executes larger volumes of trades than some of the multibank systems.
This system for leaving orders is more sophisticated than many cash execution platforms. It will accept order uploads in any format, so that clients do not have to reconfigure their spreadsheet according to a specific template. It also nets transactions automatically for settlement purposes post trade. But it is not perfect - unlike many cash execution systems, it does not net trades pre-execution.