US
Wonderful news for BarCap’s FX professionals: they’re close to achieving their avowed aim of displacing Deutsche Bank as the world’s number one in FX.
The new Euromoney FX survey is out.
It reveals that BarCap is now the world’s number two in FX, above UBS, which has slipped to position 3.
Arguably, this is a little weird given that BarCap’s lost a lot of FX people over the past year – and that many of them have gone to UBS.
For example, Richard Longmore, formerly of BarCap, became head of European FX sales at UBS in July last year. George Athanasopoulos, who was at BarCap until 2009, before leaving to join a hedge fund, also bedded down at UBS in July, as global head of FX distribution. And then Andrew Kaufmann, also previously of BarCap, joined UBS in December.
“UBS has hired around 9 people from BarCap’s FX team over the past year,” says one FX headhunter.
Despite this, UBS hasn’t done any better in FX. It’s done worse. According to Euromoney, its market share went from 11.3% in 2010 to 10.6% now.
FX headhunters say it’s too soon for the FX hiring at UBS to have have had an impact. “They’ve barely been there six months. It takes a year to get up to speed,” says one.
In last week’s conference call, CFO John Cryan suggested the bank’s failure to perform in some areas (although he was not talking about FX) could possibly be attributed to its people – given that the bank had given them sufficient capital, risk and balance sheet to play with.
A spokeswoman for UBS said the bank has consistently succeeded in being a top 3 FX bank and was pleased to have regained the number one position in FX swaps. “UBS remains confident that key investments already made will deliver results throughout 2011 to further improve client satisfaction and regain market share next year,” she added.
The Euromoney FX survey results:
Source: Euromoney (via Bloomberg)
Surprised that big names such as Goldman, MS and CS are so low down the league table. Could anybody shed any light on this?
Dude – FX trading is the mother of all flow businesses – economies of scale are key. So larger banks, with more corporate clients and local market presence tend have greater market share. GS, CS and MS don’t really have a big presence in commercial banking or local markets (and probably don’t want to, the costs of earning a pip per transaction in FX isn’t worth it unless you become absolutely massive, which has its own problems).
FX is all about balance sheet. Margins are tiny so profit comes from scalping the pennies from the billion pound trades. This is the bread and butter of FX.
MS and GS cannot compete in this type of trading. They probably engage in more high margin fx trades so overall have less market share.
MS GS and CS aren’t large??
I thought they were tier 1 banks? If they don’t focus on FX tuff, what do they do instead?
Thanks
it is not a matter of being large, it is like Analyst say’s “commerical and local markets” – and GS MS are not present in these areas.
@nearlyfriday – What do you think investment banks do? it is not all about trading – IPO’s, M&A – have a look into it
CS is not a tier 1 bank you idiot
You do need to have balance sheet support to see all segments of the market, US investment banks can struggle in this regard and do tend to cherry pick. Having said that, their offerings are typically the best in the market.