Electronic Broking Services


Electronic Broking Services is a wholesale electronic trading platform used to trade foreign exchange with market-making banks. It was originally created as a partnership by a number of the world's largest banks and is now part of CME Group.

History

EBS was created by a partnership of the world's largest foreign exchange market making banks in 1990 to challenge Reuters' threatened monopoly in interbank spot foreign exchange and provide effective competition. By 2007, approximately US$164 billion in spot foreign exchange transactions were traded every day over EBS's central limit order book, EBS Market.
EBS's closest competitor is Reuters Dealing 3000 Spot Matching. The decision by an FX trader whether to use EBS or Thomson Reuters Matching is driven largely by currency pair. In practice, EBS is the primary trading venue for EUR/USD, USD/JPY, EUR/JPY, USD/CHF, EUR/CHF and USD/CNH, and Thomson Reuters Matching is the primary trading venue for commonwealth and emerging market currency pairs.
EBS initiated e-trading in spot precious metals, spanning spot gold, silver, platinum and palladium, and remains the leading electronic broker in spot gold and silver through the Loco London Market.
They were the first organisation to facilitate orderly black box or algorithmic trading in spot FX, through an application programming interface. By 2007 this accounted for 60% of all EBS flow.
In addition to spot FX and Precious Metals, EBS has expanded trading products through its venues to include NDFs, forwards and FX options. It has also increased the range of trading style to include RFQ and streaming in disclosed and non-disclosed environments.
EBS was acquired by ICAP, the world's largest inter-dealer broker, in June 2006.
In 2014, EBS merged with BrokerTec—a service provider in the fixed income markets—to form EBS BrokerTec. BrokerTec's offering comprises trading solutions for many US and European fixed income products including US Treasuries, European Government Bonds and European Repo.
In 2017, EBS BrokerTec was renamed to NEX Markets and the name EBS BrokerTec ceased to exist. The names of the trading platforms, EBS and BrokerTec, remained.
In 2018, NEX Markets was acquired by CME Group.

Structure

Products of the company include: