Digital Assets

Börse Berlin’s Equiduct Launches Commission-Free on-Exchange Trading for Retail Brokers

Börse Berlin - retail brokersThe pan-European trading platform operated by Börse Berlin has launched a commission-free, on-exchange trading service for retail brokers in Europe, developed to ensure that private investors can benefit from guaranteed best execution on a European regulated market.

The new service, Apex, is backed by Equiduct’s pool of liquidity providers and active brokers, and will be available for the most liquid and fragmented equities and ETFs across the major European markets and guarantees a multilateral and MiFID II compliant trading environment. New members joining Equiduct will automatically be admitted to Apex and existing members will require no additional setup or agreements.

Equiduct guarantees best execution by automatically calculating the best possible price (the VBBO) for each order at the instant at which a trade occurs. Apex is fully  pre and post-trade transparent, and participating brokers will receive daily execution quality reports which provide evidence of best execution for each trade. Retail orders submitted to Equiduct will trade against a pool of liquidity providers as well as other brokers present in the order book (fully multilateral execution). Fees for retail orders sent to Apex are set to zero.

Dave Murphy, Chief Executive Officer of Equiduct, said: “Since 2009 Equiduct has been focused on solving the complex issues created by market fragmentation in Europe for retail brokers. Today we make the transformative step of offering a complete, on-exchange guaranteed best execution solution with zero fees for brokers. The launch of Apex sets us on the path to become the Europe’s largest pan-European retail exchange.”

In July 2019, Equiduct secured an investment of €3.25 million from Optiver, Virtu, Börse Berlin, Dr. Jos Peeters, and other investors, in order to increase its market share while expanding its product offering and instrument coverage. The service currently trades over €40 billion per year.

Equiduct is a market segment of Börse Berlin which offers a fully transparent central limit order book in approximately 1,500 European shares and two unique liquidity provision schemes, called PartnerEx catering for Retail order flow and SpotVBBO servicing Institutional flow.

Equiduct provides an electronic Lit Order Book trading Europes most liquid instruments and utilizes the fragmented liquidity across Europe to deliver a premium Best Execution service. Equiduct’s trading model combines a vanilla central limit order book HybridBook with premium Retail (PartnerEx) and Institutional (SpotVBBO) Best Execution services, to deliver an all in one trading solution for retail and institutional investors.