Moscow Exchange has acquired a 17% stake in the company behind the development of the proprietary OTC FX platform NTPro and has agreed to consolidate ownership of up to 100% of NTPro’s parent company BierbaumPro over a period of three years.
NTProgress was launched in 2016 and quickly became one of the leading platform solution providers on the Russian OTC FX electronic market, with a client base of more than 30 banks. The platform offers solutions for liquidity aggregation, matching, and algo execution
across a wide range of FX instruments.
The acquisition will expand both companies’ service offering and allow the two parties to offer clients NTPro’s highly flexible advanced FX trading solutions alongside MOEX’s clearing and settlement facilities.
In May 2020, MOEX announced that the company is currently serving 5 million retail investors with a trading account on the platform. The number has risen by one million year to date. In January-April 2020, an average of 258,000 individual accounts were opened every month, compared to 159,000 accounts in the same period in 2019. 597,000 retail investors executed at least one trade in April. Brokerage accounts account for 88% of the total, and trust management accounts represent the remaining 12%.
It was in 2018 that MOEX first signed an agreement with 20 other Russian financial market participants in order to develop a retail investor platform. Called Marketplace, the platform operated by MOEX allows access to offerings of Russian financial institutions (banks,
asset managers, and insurance companies), tools to compare them, and the means to purchase them remotely.
The Moscow Exchange has recently added new instruments and services, including a pilot USD/RUB order book and new instruments for the JPY/RUB currency pair. It has also introduced new currency pairs such as USD/CNY, USD/TRY, and will be added to the global over-the-counter (OTC) liquidity access project. MOEX will also introduce matching at
the weighted average USD/RUB FX rate, which will correlate to the Bank of Russia’s official rate.
