Citibank launches CitiVELOCITY 2.0

Publication date: 26 January 2012
Author: FX-MM

Tagged with: Anil Prasad, Citibank, CitiVELOCITY 2.0, Steve Shaw

FX-MM attended a media roundtable and demo at Canary Wharf last week on the launch of CitiVELOCITY 2.0, the new version of the global bank’s highly successful single-dealer trading platform.

The briefing was given by the urbane Anil Prasad, Citi’s Global Head of Foreign Exchange & Local Markets. Prasad is a man who, with over 1,500 FX traders, sales and treasury risk management people in 72 countries, has been described as “the world’s most powerful FX banker.”

According to Prasad, Citi had a good year in 2011 with growth in their FX volumes and added that the market theme for 2012 will be the “need for speed,” in other words the continued pursuit of lower latency. While New York-Chicago is down to 13 milliseconds, New York-London is still 4 times slower at 52 milliseconds. New York-Singapore is 230 milliseconds so there remains much to be done on the latency front.

Prasad also made a number of insightful observations on the markets and spoke about falling transaction costs, spreads which are a quarter of what they were 10 years ago, how algos are particularly efficient in a sideways market and about the arrival of trading with a 5th decimal place.

Turning to the new platform itself the demo was flawless and the functionality was highly impressive. Development work on version 2.0 began a year ago and much of the focus has been on optimising trading performance and making gains in desktop efficiency. 2.0 has 50 new features, including enhanced CitiFX Wire, new order management, streaming of options prices and volatilities, and more comprehensive reporting functionality.

There is web and mobile access, and to back up Prasad’s point that considerable focus has been placed on making the most of desktop real estate, i.e. reducing the number of screens on a trader’s desk, what looked particularly impressive in the demo was the ability to slice and dice lots of information/data feeds from various sources and bring it all together in one place. With 2.0, traders are able to display all the key elements of a cash FX execution trade on a customisable “price tile” which has visually impressive 3D graphics and powerful charting capability.

CitiVELOCITY 2.0 Screenshot

In a Q & A session following the demo Prasad observed that it is the wholesale and institutional markets where Citi are seeing the most growth and added that 100,000 Citi clients will have access to CitiVELOCITY 2.0. In response to a question about a possible Financial Transaction Tax in Europe he said that “it will have a big impact.”