New York 3 November, 2010 – BGC Partners, Inc. (NASDAQ: BGCP) a leading global intermediary to the wholesale financial markets, today launched the first electronic auction-style trading platform for US Dollar-denominated Interest Rate Swaps (IRS), available to most of its global large bank and dealer customers.
BGC is also pleased to announce its launch of fully electronic trading in Singapore dollar IRS at the end of October. This follows the launch on August 31, 2010 of BGC Trader IRS for Euro Interest Rate Swaps, and last month of dollar Interest Rate Options on Volume Match.
Rob Sutton, Managing Director, Global Head of USD IRS and Head of IRO, North America, said: “The dollar IRS market is the second largest single-currency Swaps market in the world and is traded widely on a global basis. By introducing Volume Match as an execution option for our customers, we are providing them with greater flexibility to trade either via voice or electronically according to their preference. Based on the significant success of Volume Match and BGC Trader in other interest rate derivative products – with approximately US$70 billion in notional volume traded since the end of August – we believe that Volume Match for dollar IRS will further increase volumes in this highly liquid market.”
Phil Norton, Executive Managing Director, Global Head of e-Commerce, commented: “We continue to build out our technology platform for fully electronic trading and introduce new products based on customer demand for automation. Over a quarter of our global desks now offer fully electronic trading – more than double the number of desks that were live 18 months ago. Volume Match has proved to be very popular with customers due to the simplicity of the interface, the greater efficiencies offered by the system and its ability to stimulate a market even on relatively quiet trading days.”
